Her review of the field of modern dance, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance , remains an important work, and has been reprinted into the 21st century. Lloyd lived in Massachusetts her whole life, and covered dance performances across the Northeastern United States. Margaret Thayer was born in South Braintree, Massachusetts in According to her longtime friend Pauline Chellis, she was a descendant of Sylvanus Thayer , and took the name "Margaret Lloyd" as a pen name after a stepfather.
Her work expanded to dance in , focusing especially on the rapidly-expanding field of modern dance. Lloyd wrote a review of the field of early 20th-century modern dance in , The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance.
Published by Alfred A. Knopf , it was noted for its pioneering approach. Lloyd continued her work in the field of dance criticism after publishing The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance , writing for the Christian Science Monitor until her death in Lloyd's final piece was her review of the Roberto Iglesias ballet company at Boston's Symphony Hall for The Monitor , published after her death. Lloyd was one of the first full-time dance critics writing for major American newspapers, and one of the first to focus on modern dance.
Historian Lynne Conner contextualizes dance criticism in major American newspapers with music criticism, which she argues became commonplace in large-city papers in the s, and became more conservative in the late 19th century. Duncan's immense popularity with the American media was still insufficient to create comprehensive coverage of modern dance in American newspapers, with sensationalism and intense skepticism common in reviews of modern dance from the s and 20s.
Lloyd married The Monitor 's music and theater editor Leslie A. Sloper some time during her employment at The Monitor. They had three children, and Lloyd also had one child from a previous marriage. Fellow dance critic Walter Sorell described Lloyd's criticism as personal, story-driven, and authentic.
