posted on 14 Aug 2020

Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade

I’ve always loved the Bloomsbury area of London because despite all modern day efforts to destroy its essentially Georgian elegance, something of its romance survives in the fabric of the buildings and the geography of its physical layout. The squares with their green spaces allow you to see just what drew an emerging suburban middle class to the area in the first place and what has kept subsequent generations of writers and artists living there until the price of doing so made it an impossible proposition and the expansion of UCL captured so much of the real estate.

Author, Francesca Wade has done her research and out of that came the delightful discovery that one of the more obscure of Bloomsbury’s squares, Mecklenburgh Square, just happened to provide a home for five notable women writers and scholars in the inter-war years. The five – poet, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.); novelist, Dorothy L. Sayers; academics, Jane Ellen Harrison & Eileen Power; and, inevitably given that this is Bloomsbury after all, Virginia Woolf – allow Wade to provide not only a pen portrait of these women but also to draw out a whole lot more. As Johanna Thomas-Corr writes in her review of this book in The Guardian, Wade's aims are more ambitious than simple biographical archaeology and she tells :

“a deeper story about women’s autonomy in the early 20th century, about their work and education, politics and activism. 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.”

Of the five portraits of writers and academics that we have here, I personally really enjoyed and would have been delighted to have more of the Imagist poet, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and the young Dorothy L. Sayers – both of whom used their tenancy in Mecklenburgh Square to find their personal liberation. These were women literally finding a room of their own.

Perhaps the least necessary portrait here is that of Virginia Woolf who was only really a short term and somewhat reluctant occupant of the square at the very start of the Second World War. Woolf’s life has been so thoroughly examined by so many excellent biographers that it’s hard to see how Wade could really have added much to what is already on record.

I said early on in this review that this book was structured to provide a pen portrait of five women writers and academics but if I was pressed the sixth and less acknowledged portrait is my favourite – that of Mecklenburgh Square itself. I loved the historical and architectural detail of both Bloomsbury and the Squares and there was, for me at least, an unexpectedly racy background to this now very affluent area. Thomas-Corr in her review does an excellent job of capturing some of the vivid colour Wade presents us with:

‘ These properties, within striking distance of the British Museum and Coram’s Fields, now sell for millions but back then they housed poor families, prostitutes, artists, radicals and – heavens! – working women. At the turn of the 20th century, the lives of middle-class girls were changing fast and for many, the immediate goal was no longer an advantageous marriage but somewhere to think and learn uninterrupted. “At last, here was a district of the city where a room of one’s own could be procured,” Wade says, echoing Woolf. Her book takes its title from a 1925 diary entry, in which Woolf extols the pleasures of “street sauntering and square haunting”.’

I really could do with more of this stuff and I’m off to find out if there’s a biography of the Bloomsbury Squares and, if there is, I will be saying a bigger thank you to Francesca Wade, not just for her stimulating bit of ‘square haunting’ but for sending me off on another intriguing journey.

At the time of writing this review, the book is still only available in its original hardback format.

 

Terry Potter

August 2020