Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars,
Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars By Francesca Wade Faber £20
Group biographies are in vogue, and the idea for this one won a Biographers’ Club prize for Francesca Wade.
One day, she’d chanced on a hidden Bloomsbury square, Mecklenburgh (named after George III’S queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-strelitz), familiar to me for its tennis court, convenient for Fleet Street.
I knew Laurie Lee lived there in 1938 with his rich married mistress, Lorna Wishart, who was pregnant with their love child, Yasmin. But now, thanks to Wade, I learn what a favourite habitat it was for poets and bohemians more generally between the wars.
Wade selects five women writers who found Rooms of Their Own there, chief among them Virginia Woolf. This is a world of book-filled, white-painted rooms, with table and typewriter, modern pictures and overflowing ashtrays, where an independent woman could invite friends of both sexes to drinks or supper.
Bloomsbury attracted left-leaning thinkers and freedom-seeking refugees with its links to women’s education (Bedford College), philanthropy (the foundlings’ home in Coram Fields), art (the Slade on Gower Street) and study: all her subjects had a ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum. Bookshops and publishers proliferated.
The square’s stuccoed houses were built by Samuel Pepys Cockerell in neoclassical style with Ionic columns, with plane trees shading their central garden. A century later, they were in seedy multi-occupation, with penny-inthe-slot gas meters, shared bathrooms and live-in landladies. Yet for these women, Mecklenburgh Square was a haven. Words flowed.
Wade’s writers and scholars tended to be poor pickers of men, and children don’t get a look-in. Dorothy L Sayers, Somerville scholar and later a formidable, chain-smoking, toweringly successful figure, fell for some hopeless types: the self-important, self-pitying Ukrainian writer John Cournos; followed by ‘Mac’ – byline ‘Atherton Fleming’ – the bibulous motoring correspondent of the News of the World.
Sayers wrote to her parents in their draughty old rectory, ‘Dear mother, don’t faint. I am coming home for Christmas with a man and a motor-cycle.’ Motorbike Man was the bankrupt Bill White, who was fun, though married, and she was already pregnant by him. Anthony remained her secret child – ‘I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with the infant, but he’s a very nice one’ – whom she dispatched to her cousin Ivy to bring up, leaving Dorothy free to gaze out on the tennis players in Mecklenburgh Square, and start on the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel.
The six-foot American-born poet Hilda Doolittle, ‘HD’, who dressed in flowing Greek gowns and was once engaged to Ezra Pound, was the earliest to arrive, in 1914. She had a ‘strange liaison’ with D H Lawrence; Sigmund Freud was her psychoanalyst; and though she married the writer Richard Aldington, he was unfaithful and she met (chez the Lawrences in Cornwall) one Cecil Gray, a ‘cynical aesthete’ who fathered her child and then promptly left. Like Sayers, HD consigned the upbringing of the baby Perdita to another woman – her partner Winifred Bryher, a rich lesbian heiress and benefactress.
Woolf, of course, is Wade’s most familiar subject; and Jane Harrison, the Newnham classics don, perhaps the most distinguished.
But, to my mind, the star of this book is the Girton scholar Eileen Power, a brilliant medieval historian with a vivid personality, and taste for fashion and frivolity. Her invitations beckoned guests for ‘Dancing in the kitchen’. She had crossed the Khyber Pass – then closed to women – in male disguise. When Cambridge refused to recognise women’s degrees, she defected from her Girton fellowship to the LSE. She came to Mecklenburgh Square to live ‘alone, but with enormous quantities of friends’ and hung out in Soho cafés and clubs. But her cause was righting social injustice, and she resigned from the Gargoyle when it wouldn’t admit her companion, the great black singer Paul Robeson.
All Wade’s women were aiming for a perfect partnership of mutually respecting equals. Eileen Power achieved this with Michael ‘Munia’ Postan, an émigré Russian LSE student of hers, nine years her junior.
This admirable debut from Francesca Wade ends on a fitting note: on the site of Virginia Woolf’s home – bombed in 1940 – there now stands a charitable graduate residential college.
‘Researchers have established, as far as possible, where Virginia Woolf’s study at 37 Mecklenburgh Square would have sat within the modern building. Now that room is given over each year to a woman student. She arrives in London, nervous or excited about what the city may offer, as she embarks on her new course of study. She crosses Mecklenburgh Square, climbs the stairs, turns the key of her new home, and finds a book, sitting on the desk, ready for her to turn the first page: A Room of One’s Own.’