The sequel to the much-praised Mr Keynes' Revolution, follows Maynard and Lydia into the 1930s and the challenges of political turmoil and the Great Depression.
The story of one man’s intellectual journey, and of a very remarkable marriage.
1926. Maynard Keynes has long been a thorn in the side of the British Establishment: an irritant to the Treasury, the Bank of England and his fellow academics alike. Rejected for his radical ideas, he has made an unlikely marriage to a Russian ballerina, her eccentricity charming him almost as much as it infuriates his highbrow Bloomsbury friends. But as the world around them changes, Maynard and Lydia cannot stay cocooned in their private refuge for long.
While Maynard frets about the ever-growing dole queues, and plans his route to power by way of the magnetic Lloyd George, Lydia is tormented by the thought of her family in Leningrad. Exiled by the Russian Revolution, she has found fame and fortune as the star dancer of Diaghilev’s celebrated Ballets Russes. Yet however demanding the role of stage celebrity, it is less challenging than that of the supposedly respectable and fortunate Mrs Keynes: the scrutiny of a crowded theatre less intense than from those convinced her marriage is heading for disaster.
In truth for Lydia and Maynard, marriage was always a gamble, and their life a dance where nobody is ever quite sure of the steps.
Then comes the Wall Street Crash, followed by a depression the likes of which the world has never seen. A society barely recovered from the Great War seems dangerously close to collapse. In the turmoil of the 1930s, the intellectual Maynard finds that answers must be sought in the most unlikely places.
The story of the man who invented modern economics.
In tumultuous times, it is not enough to hope for calmer waters.
Set during some of the most momentous years of the twentieth century, this novel explores the lives of two figures at the heart of those economic and cultural upheavals: John Maynard Keynes, considered by many as the most important economist of all time, and one of Time Magazine’s most significant people of the twentieth century, and the celebrated and eccentric Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Beginning in the “roaring twenties”, with ever-growing unemployment queues and a General Strike that pitches the whole labouring class against the governing elite, their journey takes them from the heart of the Bohemian Bloomsbury Group in Sussex, to Leningrad in Soviet Russia, to New York in the grip of the Great Depression, to the quiet colleges courts of Cambridge. The supporting cast ranges from a Welsh kitchen maid to pioneering socialist Beatrice Webb, fascist leader Oswald Mosley, politician Winston Churchill and writer Virginia Woolf.
A sequel to Mr Keynes’ Revolution, which was much praised for the depth of its research, and the way it deftly interwove economic ideas and history into a story of personal relationships and romance, Mr Keynes’ Dance is another intellectually daring and page-turning historical novel, which continues the tumultuous and surprising story of Maynard and Lydia.
E.J. Barnes studied economics at Cambridge before becoming a professional writer, and so was aware of the importance of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. She happened on his life story almost be accident, and realised that it would be a fantastic subject for fiction, resulting in her first adult novel, Mr Keynes' Revolution. She has written in a range of forms, and been published in several languages. She has been invited to speak at literary festivals, conferences, libraries and schools.
