Square Haunting

February 15, 2020
A group portrait of five celebrated female writers who declined to ride shotgun for the men who drove British literary life from World War I through 1940. Debut author Wade, who edits the London-based White Review, puts a new spin on the old idea of topographical resonance--the belief that you are what you inhabit--in a book about trailblazing women who lived on Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury at times that occasionally overlapped. The author uses Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a touchstone for the social and intellectual equality her subjects craved when they moved to the square, drawn partly by its cheap rents and proximity to the British Museum. Economic historian Eileen Power, one of them, scoffed at the idea that "the ideal wife should endeavor to model herself upon a judicious mixture of a cow, a muffler, a shadow, a mirror," a variation on a sentiment that others in the book seemed broadly to share, if they expressed it less bluntly. The poet H.D. briefly shared her flat with D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. The detective novelist Dorothy Sayers wrote her first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery in Mecklenburgh Square, five years before the arrival of the intrepid classicist Jane Harrison, who visited ancient ruins and smoked a pipe on the steps of the Parthenon. The unlucky Woolf moved in a year before the first bombs fell on London and, after an explosion destroyed her house, found "mushrooms sprouting on the carpets." At times, Wade overreaches or strains to link the women, most of whom weren't friends: Each, she writes, "sought to reinvent her life" in the square, a brute-force cliché at odds with her subjects' more original thinking. But the author has a jeweler's eye for sparkling anecdotes, and Bloomsbury ultimately emerges as far more than an anchorage for bohemians who "lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles." Engaging profiles of women who found metaphorical rooms of their own in interwar London.

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Starred review from February 17, 2020
Wade, editor of White Review magazine, makes an excellent debut with a gripping account of the lives of five women who lived at various times in the same square in London’s Bloomsbury district between 1916 and 1940. These women—poet H.D., mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, medievalist and economic historian Eileen Power, classicist Jane Harrison, and novelist Virginia Woolf—all drew sustenance from living in Mecklenburgh Square, which offered an artistically and politically radical milieu, as well as affordable and readily available housing for single women, then a relatively rare commodity. Wade evinces a strong grasp of what drove these women to place work ahead of love, and fluidly traces their various interrelationships. Woolf, for example, was deeply influenced by the newly female-centered histories written by Harrison and Power, both of whom she knew well, while Sayers and H.D. endured tumultuous affairs with the same man, John Cournos, who callously turned both relationships into fiction. Wade also illuminates her protagonists’ political advocacy, for egalitarian and peaceful values against hierarchical and militarist ones. By showing how these women confronted an ideological divide still existing today, this superbly written and researched work will make them highly relevant for, and accessible to, contemporary audiences. Agent: Caroline Dawnay and Sophie Scard, United Agents.

April 1, 2020

White Review editor Wade here delves into the lives of five revolutionary women and wordsmiths in the years between the two world wars--H.D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf--connected by Mecklenburgh Square in London, a location known for its progressive spirit and famous residents. While Woolf is the most widely recognizable of those featured, Wade devotes equal attention to her subjects, highlighting the ways in which each of them worked to fight against society's expectations and bring her dreams to fruition. The square also becomes a character in its own right, proving to be a lasting influence on the lives of these women and others throughout history. Thoroughly researched and brimming with titillating anecdotes, this unique blend of literary history and biography provides a richer understanding of this period in England and the influence of those who broke the molds set upon them. VERDICT Literary historians, as well as general readers up on the major events in recent British history, will be well served by this valiant debut about bold women whose struggles continue to resonate today.--Katie McGaha, LA County Lib., Agoura Hills

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