2021/081: Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars -- Francesca Wade

2021/081: Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars -- Francesca Wade

Square Haunting takes up Woolf’s call for a different sort of history: it is a biography of five great women, about feelings and drawing rooms, but also about work, politics, literature and community. And, indeed, about war, which affected each of these lives deeply. [loc. 446]

Square Haunting (the title's taken from a line in Virginia woolf's diaries) focuses on five independent, intellectual women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, between the first and second world wars. Beginning with HD (Hilda Doolittle) who lived there from 1916-1918, the book continues with Dorothy Sayers (who lived in the same rooms that HD had rented), then historian and economist Eileen Power; classicist Jane Harrison, who set up home with Hope Mirrlees; and finally a brief residency by Virgina Woolf.

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