Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars

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.