Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars

by Francesca Wade Narrated by Corrie James

Overview

Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures-many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living-and therefore of being-these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.



Square Haunting is a glorious portrait of five of the square's inhabitants whose lives intersected in the interwar years: modernist poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle; crime writer Dorothy Sayers; celebrated classicist Jane Harrison; historian and suffragist Eileen Power; and Virginia Woolf. Francesca Wade's luminous group biography restores a female voice to London's streets, revealing five unforgettable characters who forged careers and identities that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.



Roving across a time of historical upheaval, Wade takes us beyond the famed bohemian parties and political salons into the emotional texture and gender politics of daily life itself-and an era that gave birth to a new modes of working, loving, and being.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Riveting . . . vividly written . . . Wade offers us a timely invitation to join our literary foremothers in their rebellious journeys to achieve creative freedom and world harmony.”—Blanche Wiesen Cook, The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating . . . In telling their stories—which collide, overlap and echo one another—Wade follows the messy, inspiring destinies of women who fought to rise above social restrictions, oppressive notions of femininity and the condescension of men who were nearly always their inferiors.” —NPR “Fresh Air”

“Square Haunting is at once a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s powerful concept of a woman’s need for a room of her own, and an exploration of the contradictions and messy compromises so often involved in fulfilling that need. . . . A very readable and enjoyable book.”—Margaret Drabble, The New Statesman

“Captivating . . . superb . . . Wade has pulled off a remarkable feat of intellectual and social history with her erudite yet juicy first book. . . . An engaging narrative, movingly bookended by descriptions of the obliteration of a world she so vividly evokes. . . . This impressive feminist history stands as an elegiac love letter to a bygone time and place that offered brilliant, iconoclastic women a unique opportunity for freedom and self-expression.”—Wall Street Journal

“Endlessly interesting, unshowy, tightly argued and large-hearted. . . . The women’s characters and situations leap off the page, helped by the kind of details—from interior décor to what they wore—that bring prose alive. . . . Wade reframes half a century of supposedly familiar literary and intellectual history and illustrates everything Woolf meant by ‘a room of one’s own’.”—Aida Edemariam, The Guardian

“Powerful . . . Just as Harrison and Power rewrote history to include the lives of forgotten women, so Wade reestablishes the importance of thinkers like Power and H.D., whose legacies have been eclipsed by those of their male contemporaries.”—The New Yorker

“Serious, stylish . . . It is a pleasure to fall into step with the eloquent, elegant Wade as she stamps the streets of literary London. I would give a copy to every young woman graduating from university and wondering who and how to be.”—Laura Freeman, The Times

“Rich and powerful.”—Ruth Franklin, Harper’s

"Original and erudite. . . . Wade is adept at evoking the gritty texture of the times, taking us seamlessly from the interior lives of her subjects into the world they inhabited and back again. . . . Wade distils half a century of social and literary history into these five women’s lives with a marvellously light touch. This is biography as fresh and engaging as you are likely to find."—Ariane Bankes, The Spectator

Kirkus Reviews

2020-01-20
A group portrait of five celebrated female writers who declined to ride shotgun for the men who drove British literary life from World War I through 1940.

Debut author Wade, who edits the London-based White Review, puts a new spin on the old idea of topographical resonance—the belief that you are what you inhabit—in a book about trailblazing women who lived on Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury at times that occasionally overlapped. The author uses Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone for the social and intellectual equality her subjects craved when they moved to the square, drawn partly by its cheap rents and proximity to the British Museum. Economic historian Eileen Power, one of them, scoffed at the idea that “the ideal wife should endeavor to model herself upon a judicious mixture of a cow, a muffler, a shadow, a mirror,” a variation on a sentiment that others in the book seemed broadly to share, if they expressed it less bluntly. The poet H.D. briefly shared her flat with D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. The detective novelist Dorothy Sayers wrote her first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery in Mecklenburgh Square, five years before the arrival of the intrepid classicist Jane Harrison, who visited ancient ruins and smoked a pipe on the steps of the Parthenon. The unlucky Woolf moved in a year before the first bombs fell on London and, after an explosion destroyed her house, found “mushrooms sprouting on the carpets.” At times, Wade overreaches or strains to link the women, most of whom weren’t friends: Each, she writes, “sought to reinvent her life” in the square, a brute-force cliché at odds with her subjects’ more original thinking. But the author has a jeweler’s eye for sparkling anecdotes, and Bloomsbury ultimately emerges as far more than an anchorage for bohemians who “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”

Engaging profiles of women who found metaphorical rooms of their own in interwar London.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172685347
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

In the Square

Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the City, and should still ask for more.
—Virginia Woolf, “London Revisited” (1916)

Marooned on an island in the middle of a busy junction, a stone woman stoops to fill an urn with water. The drinking fountain on which she kneels has long since run dry; the steps leading down to the public lavatories behind her are boarded up; the elegant parade of Georgian buildings to her right is severed by a busy construction site. She breathes the fumes of cars passing down Guilford Street, which connects Bloomsbury with Clerkenwell and London’s east, while workmen perch on her pedestal to eat their sandwiches. She is a remnant of the past frozen in the present, her name and story buried like the Fleet river on whose banks Guilford Street was built.

Cities are composed of roads and buildings, but also of myths and memories: stories which bring the brick and asphalt to life, and bind the present to the past. For Virginia Woolf, this unassuming statue just outside the entrance to Mecklenburgh Square—the Woman of Samaria, commissioned by a group of sisters in memory of their mother and designed by Henry Darbishire in 1870—was “one of the few pieces of sculpture in the streets of London that is pleasing to the eye.” In a city decorated liberally with images of hoary statesmen in celebration of their service to the Empire, Woolf was intrigued by this anonymous woman, who seemed to represent an alternative, hidden history. “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. In that book, she describes wandering the streets of London and observing women talking, walking, shopping, and selling; their everyday animation reminds her of “the accumulation of unrecorded life” which historians—in their habitual focus on “the lives of great men”—were yet to chronicle. For Woolf, the statue paid subversive tribute to the forgotten women of London’s past, a small but significant reminder of the figures who have been left out of books, or whose talents were never allowed to reach their full potential, simply because they were women.

In May 1917, T. S. Eliot described for his mother a visit to the American poet Hilda Doolittle, his new colleague on the Egoist magazine. “London is an amazing place,” he wrote. “One is constantly discovering new quarters; this woman lives in a most beautiful dilapidated old square, which I had never heard of before; a square in the middle of town, near King’s Cross station, but with spacious old gardens about it.” Somehow, Mecklenburgh Square has remained a quiet enclave out on Bloomsbury’s easternmost edge, separated from the better-known garden squares by Coram’s Fields and the brutalist ziggurat of the Brunswick Centre. It is bounded by a graveyard (St. George’s Gardens) and the noisy Gray’s Inn Road, while its central garden—unusually for Bloomsbury—remains locked to nonresidents and hidden behind high hedges. But for D. H. Lawrence, a one-time lodger there, Mecklenburgh Square was the “dark, bristling heart of London.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, Mecklenburgh Square was a radical address. And during the febrile years which encompassed the two world wars, it was home to the five women writers whose stories form this book. Virginia Woolf arrived with her bags and boxes at a moment of political chaos; she deliberated in her diaries “how to go on, through war,” unaware that another writer had asked exactly that question in the same place twenty-three years earlier, as Zeppelin raids toppled the books from her shelf. Hilda Doolittle, known as H. D., lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square during the First World War, and hosted Lawrence and his wife Frieda while her husband Richard Aldington was fighting in France. In 1921, three years after H. D. had left the square abruptly for a new start in Cornwall, Dorothy L. Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey, the swaggering hero of her first detective novel, in the very same room where H. D. had begun work on the autobiographical novel cycle that would occupy her for the rest of her life. From 1926 to 1928, Jane Ellen Harrison, the pioneer of classical and anthropological studies, supported a Russian-language literary magazine from the square, working among a diverse milieu of diaspora intellectuals. And at number 20, between 1922 and 1940, the historian Eileen Power convened socialist meetings to chart an anti-fascist future, scripted pacifist broadcasts for the BBC, and hosted raucous parties in her kitchen.

These women were not a Bloomsbury Group: they lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times, though one or two knew each other, and others were connected through shared interests, friends, even lovers. H. D. and Sayers lived in the square when their careers had hardly begun, Woolf and Harrison at the very ends of their lives; Power lived there for almost two decades, Sayers and Woolf just one year each. But for all of them, in different ways, their time in the square was formative. They all agreed that the structures which had long kept women subordinate were illusory and mutable: in their writing and their lifestyles, they wanted to break boundaries and forge new narratives for women. In Mecklenburgh Square, each dedicated herself to establishing a way of life that would let her fulfill her potential, to finding relationships that would support her work and a domestic setup that would enable it. But it was not always easy. Their lives in the square demonstrate the challenges, personal and professional, that met—and continue to meet—women who want to make their voices heard.

Though I’ve lived in London all my life, I’d never heard of Mecklenburgh Square until I walked through it by chance one summer evening in 2013. Gazing up at the firmly drawn curtains above H. D.’s weather-worn blue plaque (the only commemoration of any of them there today), I tried to imagine the conversations that had taken place just a few meters away, almost a hundred years earlier. Later, at home, reading about this mysterious square and its illustrious roster of past inhabitants, I was astonished to learn that so many other women writers—some of whose names were unknown to me, but whose lives and work sounded as fascinating as the more famous ones—had made their homes here around the same time. I wanted to know what had drawn these women here, and what sort of lives they’d lived in these tall, dignified houses, where they had written such powerful works of history, memoir, fiction, and poetry—often recreating the square itself in their work. Was their shared address simply a coincidence? Or was there something about Mecklenburgh Square that had exerted on each of them an irresistible pull? They all seemed, on the surface, such different characters, preoccupied by divergent concerns and moving in separate, if occasionally overlapping, circles—but was there anything fundamental that united them, beyond the simple fact that they had happened to alight, at some point, in this hidden corner of Bloomsbury?

The next time I found myself nearby, I took a detour to Mecklenburgh Square. As I wandered around looking for gaps in the thick hedge through which I might glimpse the garden, I remembered Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration of 1929: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” Turning back for a last glance at H. D.’s balcony as I headed toward Russell Square tube, I wondered if Woolf’s extraordinary essay might help me understand the texture of these women’s lives here, the prejudices they were fighting and the opportunities they grasped. I began to suspect that what H. D., Sayers, Harrison, Power, and Woolf herself were seeking in Mecklenburgh Square was everything Woolf had urged women writers to pursue: a room of their own, both literal and symbolic; a domestic arrangement which would help them to live, work, love, and write as they desired. Perhaps, I thought, it was this which attracted them all, in the interwar years, to Bloomsbury: a place already with a literary heritage, close to the British Museum Reading Room and the theatres and restaurants of the West End, where a new kind of living seemed possible, and where radical thought might flourish amid a political atmosphere founded on a zeal for change.

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