Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars
By Francesca Wade
Tim Duggan Books
Penguin Random House, 2020

“In Mecklenburgh Square,” writes Francesca Wade about Jane Harrison, Hilda Doolittle, Dorothy Sayers, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf, “each dedicated herself to establishing a way of life that would let her fulfill her potential, to finding relationships that would support her work and a domestic setup that would enable it.” In Square Haunting, Wade notes that these five women didn’t all know each other, didn’t live in Mecklenburgh Square at the same, and didn’t experience it at the same points in their respective careers. Doolittle, known to literature as the famous poet H.D., and Sayers, immortal for her creation of the Lord Peter and Harriet Vane mystery novels, each lived in the square at the ramshackle beginnings of their careers; the great novelist and critic Woolf and the great classicist Harrison lived there only at the end of their lives; the groundbreaking medievalist Power lived there for many years. 

All were drawn there for similar reasons: with its shabby-Bohemian cheap ‘digs’ and its proximity to the restaurants and shows of the West End, seemed to offer, as Wade puts it, “a new kind of living” - a chance in some cases to forge a life that wasn’t bounded either by the drudgery of teaching or the necessity of an upwardly-mobile marriage, a chance to pull away from the conventional world a bit and assess the worth and likelihood of engaging with it at all on its own terms.

It’s an inspired conceit for a group biography, a location biography, and Wade writes it beautifully. She’s every bit as masterfully adept whether she’s writing about the obvious star of her show, Virginia Woolf, whose every hiccup and sneeze has been the subject of a 500-page book, or whether she’s writing about figures like Power or Harrison, who will be less well-known to most of her readers, and she excels at highlighting the skeins that bind them together. This can sometimes take the most overt form - one woman moving into a furnished room that had been occupied by another years before - but also happens through the more diffuse means of inspiration: “Woolf always felt set apart from the male Bloomsbury set - Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster - who had met at Cambridge and been part of an elite, exclusively male Apostles circle under the mentorship of the philosopher G. E. Moore,” Wade writes, for example. “Jane Harrison offered Woolf an alternate lineage in which she could see herself reflected: a different Cambridge, a different Bloomsbury, a different approach to history, and the possibility of a different future.” 

Woolf is by far the best-chronicled of Wade’s group, but it’s of course Dorothy Sayers who was and will remain its highest earner and most accessible household name, and no doubt coincidentally she’s also easily the most memorable character in Square Haunting. Partly this is the result of discretionary arson: great heaps of the personal papers of both Harrison and Power were burned after their deaths, Power’s by her sisters and Harrison by her own hand (Wade points out the irony: they spent large part of their professional careers making exactly the kinds of historical inquiries into women of the past that will never now be possible for themselves). 

But it’s also due to Sayers’ own flamboyant personality, conveyed so well in the stream of letters she sent to the long-suffering parents who looked with gentle skepticism on her decision to launch herself into the rough-and-tumble world of living by her pen. If you like, I’ll make a sporting offer,” she writes to them in one such letter, when her prospects were looking particularly bleak, “that if you can manage to help me keep going till next summer, then, if Lord Peter is still unsold, I will chuck the whole thing, confess myself beaten, and take a permanent teaching job.” Later, when work is coming in and Lord Peter is well launched, she tells them how grateful she is that they “never cursed me or told me I was a failure, and have forked out such a lot of money and been altogether ripping to me.” 

Wade’s capsule biographies reach five different endings, of course, and she does such a lively job of presenting the cast that her readers will feel a touch of grief at their passing. When Jane Harrison died, Lytton Strachey wrote to Roger Fry: “What a wretched waste it seems that all that richness of experience and personality should be completely abolished! Why, one wonders, shouldn’t it have gone on and on? Well! There will never be anyone like her again.” When Virginia Woolf died, Elizabeth Bowen was even more to the point when writing to Leonard Woolf that “a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world.” 

Square Hauntings is constructed as a composite look at a group of women who were “determined to interrogate assumptions in spite of society’s censure;” it’s filled with the thousand triumphs little and big of five very different working writers. The whole thing breathes with infectious readability. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.