(Lydia Lopokova)

IN 1918 Keynes met Lydia at a party to celebrate the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev in London. Three years later, enthralled by Lydia’s performance in Sleeping Beauty, Keynes sat several times on his own in the stalls. After a backstage meeting, which he sought, he asked her out to dinner. Two weeks later he found an excuse to accommodate her in an apartment above his in Bloomsbury.

This unexpected love affair appalled his Bloomsbury friends. A year after marrying they had a miscarriage and subsequently never had children. Although many of Keynes’s gay friends also got married in early middle age as way of ‘disguising’ their sexuality, Keynes’s marriage to Lydia was genuine.

As noted by Virginia Woolf, ‘Maynard is passionately and pathetically in love, because he sees very well that he’s dished if he marries her, and she has him by the snout’ (1924).