One of my ideal ways of spending a morning is listening to an audiobook of my favourite novel “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf while I'm walking or riding on a bus around London. There's an added pleasure of experiencing the text while travelling around the streets that Woolf herself walked while observing the people and shop windows (an activity she referred to as “street haunting”). For the past several months of the pandemic this “haunting” has taken on a different meaning whenever I walk through central London because it's mostly deserted. Naturally, I've had a long fascination with Woolf and the Bloomsbury group so I've previously made a pilgrimage to Monk's House, followed the trail of “Mrs Dalloway” and I like to musingly wander by Woolf's statue in Tavistock Square where she had a longterm residence. However, until picking up Francesca Wade's fascinating and creatively-written group biography “Square Haunting” I wasn't aware of Mecklenburgh Square which exists on the edge of Bloomsbury.
It's striking that Wade begins her book with the partial destruction of the square she's writing about. In 1939 Virginia and Leonard took up a lease at 37 Mecklenburgh Square after the noise of nearby construction work at Tavistock Square got to be too much for their nerves. This book is partly about their short time at this residence which was bombed in a German air raid in 1940. Luckily the Woolfs weren't in the building when the bomb hit, but Virginia had to dig through the rubble to save her diaries. Wade's book is also about the (sometimes intersecting) lives, careers and interests of four other trailblazing female academics and writers who also resided in this square at different periods of time during the early 20th century. These accounts are skilfully organized in a way that tunnels back not only through their personal histories but how they contributed to the intellectual and political battle for gender equality.
I'd not encountered these fascinating women before but after reading Wade's succinct and compelling accounts of their lives I'm keen to read their work and know more about them. They include H.D. (a pen name created by Ezra Pound for the modernist poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle); the detective novelist Dorothy L Sayers (who lived in the same building that H.D. had previously inhabited); the classicist and translator Jane Ellen Harrison; and the historian, broadcaster and pacifist Eileen Power. All of these talented women had their ambition and desire to intellectually engage with society through their writing stymied in different ways by the dominant patriarchy. Wade details the particular challenges they faced and the individual ways they successfully challenged a system which hampered their ability to be taken as seriously as their male counterparts. The spirit of “A Room of One's Own” takes a direct relevance in their stories as these women established their professional and personal lives in the homes they made while living in this square. Wade's accounts of these five lives are filled with tantalizing details about their unique struggles to live, love, work and write in the way that they most desired.
I admire how Wade artfully weaves these lives together to show the overlapping influence or friendship these different women shared. In a way this makes the book feel like a wonderfully compelling collection of interconnected short stories. Occasionally there will be other figures such as a charismatic landlady, members of the Bloomsbury Group or leading intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud who appear in their separate stories. It brings this physical location to life as you see the series of coincidences and incidents in common which formed the web of experience these women shared rather than viewing their individual lives as a collection of self-contained historical studies. Recently I visited the square during a rare snowy day. It was moving to look at the plaques dedicated to these different women while imagining how they lived in these stately old buildings and walked these streets. Of course, the weather further enhanced the feeling of “haunting” and made me feel like the ghost while pondering the exuberant experience of reading Wade's group biography.
