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Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars
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About This Book
An engrossing group portrait of five women writers, including Virginia Woolf, who moved to London's Mecklenburgh Square in search of new freedom in their life and work. "I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting."--Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925 In the early twentieth century, Mecklenburgh Square--a hidden architectural gem in London's Bloomsbury--was a radical address, home to students, struggling artists, and revolutionaries. And in the pivotal era between the two world wars, the lives of five remarkable women intertwined around this one address: the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf. In an era when women's freedoms were fast expanding, they each sought a space where they could live, love, and--above all--work independently. With sparkling insight and a novelistic style, Francesca Wade sheds new light on a group of artists and thinkers whose pioneering work would enrich the possibilities of women's lives for generations to come.
Reviews
"We are still trying to figure it out."
"offers a sort of correction; by framing their stories around the small London neighborhood that set the scene for their struggles and successes, it offers an inspiring perspective on what they each achieved."
"Wade evinces a strong grasp of what drove these women to place work ahead of love, and fluidly traces their various interrelationships ..."
"Charming, intermittently interesting but hardly illuminating."
"Wade's portrait of Sayers, one of England's most private writers, perceptively illuminates her fierce independence, her complicated relationships and her often grotesque novelistic imagination ..."
"But 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."
"the pleasure of Square Haunting sits in its sympathetic portrayal of five writers each seeking a new form of life, either away from one thing or towards another."
"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."
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