Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes Judith Mackrell Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 496pp, £25

Not long after Lydia Lopokova danced at Covent Garden for the final time at the age of 41, her worst-decayed teeth were extracted and she was fitted with a denture. Everything you need to know about Lopokova is in her response to this potential humiliation: she so appreciated the denture's design that she took it out to show Frederick Ashton, last of her choreographers; then she did the same with Sam Courtauld, the textile millionaire who once desired her as his mistress. He whipped out his own choppers to compare.

Nearly 80 years later, this still seems beyond bold, like Lopokova herself. She didn't do it for effect, although her business had been the creation of physical surprises ever since she had joined the Imperial Mariinsky ballet school in St Petersburg as a child. Nor was it a performance of bohemianism: she had been a genuine bohemian for more than a decade, surviving miserable splendour in New York and exhilarating squalor in Spain, never knowing if she would share the bill next with Pavlova or Al Jolson. She had lost her country and family to the 1917 revolution; too many of her dancing years to hard choices between art and eating; and her inspiration, the Ballets Russes monster impresario Sergei Diaghilev (she called him Big Serge and got away with it), to death. She had been engaged to a Wasp sportswriter and divorced from a bigamist, and married John Maynard Keynes in the teeth of Bloomsbury contempt, in contravention of his pledge to Lytton Strachey's brotherhood of Higher Sodomy. She was desperate to succeed ballet with a career in Ibsen and Shakespeare, though it never quite happened: instead, she became full-time nurse, social secretary and bodyguard to Keynes as heart disease and wartime financial negotiations with Washington obliterated his body.

At that dental climacteric of 1933, Lopokova behaved consistently with what she had always been: a complete original, comfortable in her skin (she remained so into old age). Michel Fokine had spotted that originality when she was still an Imperial pupil - five foot tall, rounded in body, muscled in leg and pert of gesture - although his rebel choreography was predicated on Tamara Karsavina, his senior protégée. Karsavina was already different from the diamond-garlanded grandes verticales of the Mariinsky. She was dangerous even in ancien régime repertoire roles Lopokova seldom attempted. Lopokova, however, was entirely novel, proficient in the technique of an old medium but with a style suited to a nascent medium: she was the sexualised sweet teen that American movies were about to discover in Mary Pickford. As Judith Mackrell points out, when Lopokova grabbed a chance for an independent debut in the United States in 1910, her publicity set back her age from 19 to 16 and pushed the nickname Little Pet; right up to the wooing of Keynes, she blithely sat on the knee of eminent admirers, J M Barrie included.

After US freelancing wobbled (crass shows, bad management, possible concealed pregnancy), she rejoined Diaghilev, carnally knowledgeable - when her knickers descended during Les Sylphides, she kicked them off and away - but still projecting extreme youth. On the long, destitute road of a tour of wartime Europe in 1917, she had her moment and incarnated the shape of the times when éonide Massine choreographed her in a ballet of a Goldoni farce, The Good-Humoured Ladies. Massine, in a spin and whiz of futurism, borrowed attitudes and elbows from silent comedy and freed Lopokova to be her true self - "modern, active, smart and in charge of her own destiny", in Mackrell's description (she is always precise and vivid about mobility).

The moment didn't last; being the spirit of an era is only a temporary appointment. Massine gave her a second success in 1919 as the cancan doll in La Boutique fantasque, her footwork faster than ever, and then, pffff, she was gone, to more kitsch Broadway, to substituting for Karsavina in Fokine roles for which she wasn't in the right shape. She ate like a croc when food was available, and grew so plump that Diaghilev forbade her to wear a tutu and the corps de ballet offered her their bras. And then Bronislava Nijinska's angular choreography demanded an intake of sporty, lanky girls. However, the marriage to Keynes was a mutual triumph: he protected her from the impoverished indignity that awaits authentically peculiar divas, and she humanised his Bloomsbury intellect and kept him alive as long as willpower could. Britain might not have had lend lease, nor the world the International Monetary Fund, without Lydia the charlady hauling her shopping bags to Bretton Woods and policing Keynes's rest. There wouldn't be a Royal Ballet, either, as its lineage tracks back to her London fans. How shrewd and kind of Mackrell to extricate Lopokova from so many decades as the snubbed alien in Bloomsbury footnotes.

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