An Unlikely Couple

Susan Sellers’ latest novel, Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story, depicts a clash of cultures between the members of the Bloomsbury Group and the acclaimed Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova. In Sellers’s telling, the unlikely and surprising relationship between economist and Bloomsbury insider Maynard Keynes and outsider Lopokova posed a nearly existential threat to the group’s cohesiveness and carefully crafted way of life, which was based on certain shared points of view about the arts, intellect and conversation. Into their lives and homes danced a chatty Russian interloper who read Shakespeare to improve her imperfect but voluble English, ignored their hints about her intrusions into their silent work, and unexpectedly beguiled a man whom they had long claimed as one of their own. Having previously written the well-received novel Vanessa and Virginia, about sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Sellers is no stranger to biofiction. Already recognized as a scholar and editor of Virginia Woolf’s work, and translator of French writer and thinker Hélène Cixous, she also is a professor of creative writing. Her research, outlined in the novel’s ‘Acknowledgements’, is extensive, ranging from imperial Russia and ballet to Keynesian economics. She also relies—in a good way—on Judith Mackrell’s 2011 biography of Lopokova, Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes. It is this double description of Lopokova that leads Sellers to delve into the inner life of a woman who was a superb performer and unimagined wife. We know her as a Bloomsbury disrupter, but what was it like to be Lydia? In many ways, fiction may be the best vehicle for answering this question. Much has been written about vision and reality by Bloomsbury, in works like Roger Fry’s book Vision and Design or Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, but as Michael Lackey points out, ‘using fiction to access and represent a reality, such as a person’s interiority or the essence of a group, is much different from fictionalizing a person or a group’. In this novel, Sellers offers both Lopokova’s interiority and the essence of a group. Susan Sellers, Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story, Edward Everett Root, London, 2022, £19.69, 230 pp., ISBN: 9781913087807