Another book that I'm shamefully late in reading - but very glad that I did.

Thanks to NetGalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review - I also bought a copy of the audiobook from Audible and so my review reflects my experiences of both.

This book centres on Mecklenburgh Square, an address in Bloomsbury, London that was home to five groundbreaking and fascinating women during the interwar years. It's an interesting idea, that this little corner of London famous for its thinkers and writers, was the shared address of these brilliant women - even though they didn't live there at the same time and were often resident at very different points in their lives. For all of them, Mecklenburgh Square proved to be the 'room of one's own' (in Virgina Woolf's words) that gave the women the freedom to develop their careers independently.

The book opens with the bombing of the square in 1940 at a point when Virginia Woolf was resident - an immersive opening and the point to which we return at the end of the book (as Woolf is the fifth of the five women presented here). Then follows a chapter each on the five women - Hilda Doolittle (HD), Dorothy L Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power, Virginia Woolf - before we return to the bomb site and a summary of the women's lives (and deaths), often after leaving the square,

Each chapter is meticulously researched and gives an insight into five very different but impactful lives. The writer is keen to present how remarkable these women were in their respective fields, although she doesn't cover over their less appealing traits either, so we are shown nuanced and realistic views rather than lists of achievements. These women pushed the boundaries - both professionally and often in their private lives too, having unconventional relationships and living arrangements for the period.

Of them all, I probably already knew most about Virginia Woolf, although this book gave me lots of information that I didn't already know too - especially about the (fascinating) work that she was doing on women, art and community before her suicide. It feels like an acute loss that this never came to fruition. The portrait of Woolf was also surprisingly vibrant and in many ways joyous - a long way from the gloomy image of her that is so often presented in the light of her tragic breakdown and death.

I don't want to spoil the book for anyone by giving away too much of these amazing women's stories. It is, however, worth noting that they excelled in such different fields so there is something that should interest everyone - as well as novelist Woolf, there is poet HD, historian Power, crime writer Sayers and linguist Harrison. There are famous friends, lovers, scandals, successes, failures, the domestic, the literary and the academic - all of life here for the reader's enjoyment.

The audiobook is beautifully read by Corrie James - her Received Pronunciation reading of the book really brings the women's lives and (relatively wealthy, middle/upper-class) world alive. It's actually becoming quite unusual to hear the Queen's English without accents nowadays (no judgement here - I love an accent!) but this was a good choice of reader for this particular book - some of whose subjects would probably sound a lot like Corrie James if they were still around to chat to us.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the audiobook, I think a print copy would be an absolute treat as there are photographs, an extensive additional reading list and a helpful index.

I find the period between the wars endlessly fascinating, because there is so much to delve into around the social changes that were taking place, especially for women, so Square Haunting really caught my attention.

In this book, Francesca Wade gives an account of the lives of five women, who are all connected by virtue of living in and around London's Mecklenburgh Square on the fringes of Bloomsbury, during the interwar years. Bloomsbury, during this era, was home to many activists and revolutionary thinkers, and Wade chooses as her subjects modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf.

I had previously only heard of the very famous Woolf and Sayers, so found it fascinating to learn about how each of each of these women fought to push the boundaries in each of their chosen professional fields and through their unconventional personal lives, forging the way for the women who came after them. Each of their stories are very much in the vein of Woolf's assertion that to explore their intellectual freedom a woman needs a room of their own, and Mecklenburgh Square is where they found the freedom to achieve their success.

Interestingly, Wade does not stop at recounting the intellectual pursuits of these women alone, but also examines how they struggled to reconcile all aspects of their lives with their need to work independently, including their romantic lives, how they supported themselves, and the stifling constraints of how others thought they should feel and act - all themes that are still very relatable for women today.

My favourite character here actually turned out to be the wonderful historian Jane Harrison, who I am keen to read more about, but all these women are fabulous trailblazers and deserve to be celebrated.

I cannot recommend this one highly enough!

Square Haunting brings together original research on five women who lived in a small area of London, examining their experiences of work and life in a period that saw dramatic improvements for some women's lives (as well as entrenchment of some restrictions). All were 'elite' in the sense that they managed to access higher education at a time when Cambridge still didn't award degrees to women (they could study, just not get the degree). I loved the way Wade brought together these very different women's lives to tell a story about how they dealt with discrimination and attempts to limit their choices. I had read a little about Dorothy Sayers, but this section was definitely a highlight for me. Wade shows how she hid her (only) child, continuing to write. In the process, the link between her own life and her choices re the character Harriet Vane are made clear. Also additions to the books that never quite made it - would have loved to read Woolf's new history, rethinking ideas about cultural history across time. It was still in note form when she died. Quoting Virginia Woolf-
'Literature is no one's private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations, there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.'

As always with this kind of book I'm left with a longer TBR pile, from Mary Beard's book about the significant of Jane Harrison's interpretation of classical women's lives, to Swastika Night which 'describes a future society ruled by descendants of Hitler's Nazi's where women are considered a subspecies...' I also want to read some of Eileen Power's history books for Penguin / Puffin

Really enjoyed this book having gone to university in Bloomsbury I’ve always been drawn to the history of the area and the arty types who resided there. It’s incredibly researched and So refreshing to hear about the lives of these women some of whom I had never heard of who by name but their works were familiar. A very interesting read I would thoroughly recommend.

Well. I've got a bunch of Netgalley ARCs I've left too long, but at least for this one it turns out that was because the perfect moment for it was waiting. It's the story of five women writers who lived in Bloomsbury's Mecklenburgh Square in the early 20th century, opening and closing with London under bombardment (though of course the Blitz is so mythologised one can easily forget the Great War bombing). We start with HD and "an abiding dread that 'the war will never be over'"; we end with Virginia Woolf, her move to the square "forcing her to confront a future which seemed increasingly futile". Sentences like "London, in the years immediately after the First World War, was a dismal place, the streets haunted by an air of gloom and decay", or Woolf's complaint that London in the next war had "become merely a congerie of houses lived in by people who work. There is no society, no luxury, no splendour, no gadding & flitting. All is serious & concentrated. It is as if the song had stopped" – when I started the book, this was history. Now it doubles as a perfect description of a few weeks back, my last time in the heart of town for who knows how long.

The book is not unduly strict about sticking to its subjects' time in Mecklenburgh Square; it's more a case of painting a picture of their lives with that time in the foreground. Certainly the conceit seems fair in a way group biographies can sometimes struggle to pull off. It's not perfect; there are a few sentences an editor should have saved, and who knows, maybe did in the final edition, of which the most glaring is the oxymoronic "volunteers began to be conscripted". Elsewhere it's more subtle errors of shading: "Strong Poison is the first Wimsey book in which Lord Peter's investment in the case overreaches the pure intellectual challenge: for the first time, dead ends leave him not titillated but helpless, terrified that he will fail", for instance. An assertion which seems questionable given his second outing, Clouds Of Witness, had already seen his brother on the hook if Wimsey didn't pull it off. Or "The publication of a memoir often signals that a life is drawing to an end, that the writer is assessing the past with the synthesising gaze of one whose work is done" – even leaving aside the celebrities who have three out by their thirtieth, this is an assertion with so many exceptions as to be scarcely worth making. But these are very much occasional annoyances in a mostly fluent and fascinating account.

Wade's first subject is HD, someone who was little more than a name to me – and in a sense not even that, just a pair of initials. Turns out her alias wasn't even her own idea but Ezra Pound's, and really, could there be a better opening illustration of these women's struggles to make their own way in the world? I can't say this left me tempted to read her work, her novels all rewriting her own tangled affairs with revealing variations of setting, incident and tone; they sound a little like Iris Murdoch minus the distance, and these days I find Murdoch herself a bit hard going. But as the protagonist of a brief life, she's excellent material, and if some of it is familiar territory (the double standards of free love in a patriarchal society which had yet to master decent contraception), both subject and biographer ensure it's still well worth reading.

Then it's the woman who made me most interested in reading this in the first place: Dorothy L Sayers. Who proves a natural successor to HD, having lived not just on the same square, but in exactly the same room, and more than that, got mixed up with the same man. By Wade's accounts, John Cournos was already a bit of a dick to start with, but it was partly his disastrous experiences with HD which soured him so much as to make him the mess he was for Sayers, the supposedly free-thinking but in fact self-regarding and controlling arsehole who would later inspire Phillip Boyes, the deeply deserving murder victim in the first Harriet Vane story, Strong Poison. Sayers, on the other hand, is a winning figure throughout, the writer struggling to make it ("I simply must hang on in London if I possibly can, it's the only place and I love it in spite of everything"), resisting the gravity of nice respectable jobs like teaching: "Cultivating an air of eccentricity betraying the fact that she didn't really want to be there, she would teach supine, lying on a bench, and once employed a sword with which to gesticulate at the blackboard". The heart of the chapter, understandably, is Sayers as seen through the lens of her masterpiece, Gaudy Night, the novel in which she investigated what the life of the mind might be like for independent women, and whether ultimately that could be harmonised with marriage. Alas, in her own life she may have materially succeeded so that she could have the luxuries she used to give Peter to distract from her own skintness, but never quite found the appropriate romantic match she gave Harriet. Interesting too that both of her leads should have been repurposed from quite separate aborted projects – it reinforces that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen sense of literature as a community, characters slipping out of their pages to mingle behind our backs, and us very occasionally having the good fortune to catch them at it.

The links thereafter are never again quite so pronounced – yes, Cournos translates a book Jane Ellen Harrison reads, but that's hardly on the same level. At first I was a little frustrated by this choice, being much better acquainted with the work of Harrison's companion Hope Mirrlees. Companion in what sense? It could be anything from much younger lover, to somewhat possessive carer; Wade doesn't think the evidence is there either way, though I'm sure many will have headcanon answers. But she does give us wonderful glimpses of their home life which, like many of the best home lives, sat somewhere in the debatable lands between running joke and cultic devotion, here centred on a teddy: "Jane and Hope developed an elaborate private world surrounding 'the Bear', in which they were his Elder and Younger Wife, united in common fidelity to the venerable male". Unlike the first two women, starting their literary lives in the Square, Harrison moved there in her seventies, after a controversial career as a classicist at Cambridge, where she was generally frowned upon for being a woman with too many ideas and too little respect for terribly serious men. If there's a flaw here, it's that Wade never quite addresses in this chapter, only in the 'After the Square' epilogue (and then glancingly) the extent to which Harrison's theories of a matriarchal religion preceding the patriarchal ones have in their turn also come to be widely regarded as a superstructure with insufficient foundation in the evidence. Still, I loved the description of the plan around this time - debated, but quickly shelved lest it publicise the idea - to outlaw "lesbianism (associated with overeducation, prostitution, alcohol, nightclubs, divorce and vampires)".

I didn't find the chapter on economic historian Eileen Power as engaging as the others (though isn't that a perfect name for an economic historian?). Wade opens with the admission that much of Power's archive was destroyed, and as a result I never got the same sense of interiority here, of Power as a person. It becomes more a general study of interwar internationalism, the rise of academia with practical applications by way of the LSE, and that painfully doomed faith in the League of Nations. Much of which I already knew all too well from other accounts of that time, and almost all of which felt far too close to home from our own. One thing I did learn, though: the turnip was only introduced to Britain in 1645! I just pictured it as the sort of joyless thing luckless mediaeval peasants ate, but it postdates the potate! Why did anybody bother?

And then Virginia Woolf. The others, even Harrison for all her years, were making new starts when they came to Mecklenburgh; Woolf had reluctantly moved from around the corner, and was in any case only there less that half the time, spending the rest of it at her country cottage. Still, she belongs here, the whole book being in a sense an expansion on the theme of A Room Of One's Own. It's not happy reading, though: the great works were not the ones written here, where she was largely working on her biography of Roger Fry, reluctantly having to tell it straight and tame it down in exactly the way the Bloomsburies were supposed to have moved past. The description of her working on scraps of paper, often with the same sentence being repeated across them over and over, is horribly suggestive of The Shining. Still, there was once more that feeling of a book read at exactly the suitable moment when Wade tells us how during the Phoney War Woolf sometimes "experienced a disconcerting – almost 'treasonable' – feeling of private contentment amid the desolation elsewhere".

The conclusion, 'After the Square', wraps up the stories of the surviving protagonists, and restates the theme. It's a fitting capstone, though served largely to annoy me at Sayers finally giving in to the pretentious snootiness of Cournos and his ilk by acting like translating Dante's shitty self-insert Bible fanfic was a bigger deal than creating Wimsey and Vane. It's also well worth at least skimming the endnotes which, in among the standard attribution of references, also have some lovely longer digressions that didn't quite fit the main body of the book, including cameos for Nabokov, GDH Cole and Aleister Crowley.

The “Square” is Mecklenburgh Square London. One of two laid out on the land bought for the Thomas Coram Foundlings Hospital in the 18th century. This was located to the north west of the City of London in a largely rural area. The plot was greater than needed and sale of the excess generated income for the Hospital. Mecklenburgh proved the less “polite” of the two squares. But it lay close to important 19th century developments – The British Museum and Reading Rooms and a number of colleges – as Bloomsbury became the centre of London’s literary and intellectual life. Over the years a number of creative people of all genres moved into and through the Square. Larger houses were split into small apartments or lodgings that allowed those of uncertain income to settle here. But as the book graphically portrayed the Square suffered considerable damage in the blitz of 1940. Post war much of the area was redeveloped as buildings for international college students and its “bohemian” nature changed.
Wade introduces six creative women who lived, (not always for very long), in the Square in the early 20th century. HD, writer, wife of Richard Aldington, hostess to D H Lawrence, admirer and client of Freud, whose later writing, poetry and translations uses classical texts to explore the central place of women. Dorothy L Sayers: writer of crime fiction, but also an n exponent of presenting women’s history and theology to a wider market. Jane Ellen Harrison who arrived in the Square in 1926 having shrugged off her hard won career as a University researcher to concentrate on modern politics. Supporting Russian intellectual exiles (and through them the survival of the Russian literary cannon). Eileen Power had a long career as an historian, first at Girton and from 1921 at the LSE where she was at a centre of left wing “radical” thinkers. Early a medievalist she later became heavily involved in internationalism even though politics were increasingly fraught. She died in relative academic obscurity too far ahead of her time. Then Virginia Woolf who lived part time in the Square during the second world war, where the Hogarth Press had been re-located. Bombed out in 1940 we are told of the impact of war and her race between completion of her last book and the depression that would lead to her death.
But as Ward says the book is intended to act as a peg on which to hang an examination of the nature and geography of this place as it developed over the years, mirrored by the assessment of the women themselves at specific times in their lives. A target she meets in a compelling and readable way. We see women at the start of their careers or towards the end – but how all managed their creative impulses and activities at a time when life (and expectations) for women was changing from the restrictive Victorian period towards a wider public role.
This book is a conversation between the author, with her wide and specialist knowledge, and the reader who might (or might not) have heard of the six, might know about them, or their writings and work. All will be shown through the lens of this space Mecklenburgh and the time they were there. You will be shown how they got there and in the case of some (i.e. HD, D L Sayers) how the experience of these years bled into their later writings. Taken together they reflect the widening of opportunities for women through academia into writing across both fiction and nonfiction as they acquire “the room of their own”. But the women live within their “real” lives of partners, children, families and these expectations. Some might question why these six were chosen when others passed through over the years, but life is a series of choices and this is not the only book in the world.
This is one of those wonderful history books that takes you into a supposed topic but in fact acts as a window to a much, much, wider view and exploration of so much more. It is an affirmation that curiosity is not a crime and that all lives are many faceted. Although supposedly about the “past” many of the tropes of feminist understanding and challenges are still playing themselves out today. The only criticism that I would make of this book is that it points put how much there is still to understand and read! Not necessarily a bad thing, but my “to read” list has grown exponentially and beyond just the familiar “greens” of the Virago Press. It is eye opening in the best sense of the world, re-positioning information you may already have and enhancing the experience of so many books still to come.

Vast and thorough research has resulted in a very readable, hugely informative, and interesting account of the lives of five women writers who have the common link of living, at some point, around Mecklenburgh Square, London. Hilda Doolittle, Jane Harrison, Dorothy L. Sayers, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf are those writers. It becomes clear that, for all of them, creativity is their focus and priority. This has repercussions in all other areas of their lives, affecting relationships, family, and careers. Fascinating. Thank you to Francesca Wade, Net Galley and the publisher, Faber & Faber.

Five women writer's biographies, linked by their lives in one square in Bloomsbury. Wade's prose is clear and appealing, with a omniscient storytelling tone that worked well for me. Each biography is about sixty pages long, perfectly judged, keeping the reader entertained, whether familiar with the subject (Dorothy Sayers, Virginia Woolf) or unfamiliar (HD, Eileen Power, Jane Harrison). Through the biographies, Wade explores issues of women's work and relationships, how to live in the world of sex, partners and children while maintaining creative and personal agency.

I really enjoyed this collection of mini-biographies of 5 remarkable women who are connected by having at one stage of their lives lived in Mecklenburgh Square, London. The poet HD, the novelist Dorothy L Sayers, the classicist Jane Harrison, the economic historian Eileen Power and the writer Virginia Woolf all at one time made their homes there, sometimes happily, sometimes not, but for each of them their stay was significant for their lives and careers. Well-researched, well-written, always interesting and illuminating, it’s a fascinating account of some fascinating women.

As absorbing as a novel, this book wears its thorough, deep research very lightly, making it enchanting to read yet teaching you so much. It combines biography with a sensitive analysis of the literary works, very useful even if you haven't read their works. Each of the five women come to life in a lively, opinionated way. Last but not least, it is also the history of a neighbourhood in London.

Loved! Loved this book! One of the best non-fiction books I read in the last 12 months

(Also, I am binge reading Dorothy L. Sayers right now, thanks to Francesca Wade book :) )

This is a fascinating journey through the lives of five, disparate women whose lives were shaped by the time they spent living in Bloomsbury between the wars. Some of them I had heard of, some of them I knew nothing about before reading this book, but I found all of their lives fascinating. It was interesting to me how much the things that exercised their minds are still relevant today and how fresh this work feels in the current political climate. Well researched, really interesting.

This is essentially a set of mini biographies of five extraordinary women in the first half of the twentieth century. The conceit of the book is that they are bound by addresses in Mecklenburg Square, Bloomsbury, but in many cases the address is irrelevant: Jane Harrison, for example, a 'foremother' to classicists, doesn't even move there till most of her career is over. I also felt that the section on Virginia Woolf is too repetitive of too much that has been written about her before. The most compelling portraits for me are those of Hilda Doolittle, known as HD, and Dorothy Sayers - and the connections between them are fascinating. The concept of 'a room of one's own' is used throughout to highlight the struggles and costs of female independence, but that room could just as easily be in an Oxbridge college as in Bloomsbury, perhaps.

So I wasn't entirely convinced by the Bloomsbury connection as a raison d'etre for the book - but the lives of the women are interesting introductions to women who challenged and overturned the status quo of their times.