Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars

Summary

Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures—many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living—and therefore of being—these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.

Square Haunting is a glorious portrait of five of the square's inhabitants whose lives intersected in the interwar years: modernist poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle; crime writer Dorothy Sayers; celebrated classicist Jane Harrison; historian and suffragist Eileen Power; and Virginia Woolf. Francesca Wade's luminous group biography restores a female voice to London's streets, revealing five unforgettable characters who forged careers and identities that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.

Roving across a time of historical upheaval, Wade takes us beyond the famed bohemian parties and political salons into the emotional texture and gender politics of daily life itself—and an era that gave birth to a new modes of working, loving, and being.