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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
"The links between the women are sometimes slack ..."
"Engaging profiles of women who found metaphorical rooms of their own in interwar London."
"It's not just the period setting, it's in the texture of Wade's prose, which is careful and measured, with none of the forced perkiness I've come to associate with digital-era feminism ..."
"Wade...makes an excellent debut with a gripping account ..."
"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."
"The book takes an erudite, analytical tone, offering a depiction that is more biography than narrative."
"A minor disappointment of the biography is that while Wade discusses her subjects' work lovingly and comprehensively, their personalities sometimes remain elusive."
"Wade does a superb job of drawing out commonalities that run far deeper than geographic coincidence ..."
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