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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
"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.' ..."
"It's not entirely her fault: Harrison burned her personal papers."
"In a captivating series of minibiographies of five women, all trailblazing writers who lived in Bloomsbury's Mecklenburgh Square at some point between 1916 and 1940, Square Haunting builds a compelling case that each woman's time there represented a crucial stage in her efforts to forge an independent life when doing so was both uncommon and difficult ..."
"What emerges is an eloquent, pellucid, sometimes poignant study of five female intellectuals, each of whom disdained convention to fulfil their potential as thinkers and writers ..."
"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."
"an in-depth, meticulously researched account ..."
"Wade evinces a strong grasp of what drove these women to place work ahead of love, and fluidly traces their various interrelationships ..."
"In our own moment of global catastrophe, Wade offers us a timely invitation to join our literary foremothers in their rebellious journeys to achieve creative freedom and world harmony."
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