A large-hearted and fascinating group biography of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L Sayers and other residents of a London square between the wars In the autumn of 1940, as the Luftwaffe made its daily death runs over the south coast and on to London, Virginia Woolf started drafting the outlines of a new book. Provisionally titled _Reading at Random_, it was to be a history of the creative impulse, of the expression of emotion as refracted through the idea of England – an alternative England, shaped not by the exploits of its statesmen and soldiers but its artists and communities. Women so far, she observed in _A Room of One’s Own_, had appeared only “as a glimpse ... in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing … a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear”, but that was not for want of ability or something to say. Woolf was determined her new history (it was never published) would take into account “the immense effect of environment and suggestion upon the mind”. It would thus, Francesca Wade points out in her new book, allow women to take centre stage. _Square Haunting_, which tells the lives of five women at a time when each of them lived on Mecklenburgh Square, in Bloomsbury, initially seems nothing like as ambitious a project, especially as only one of the women, the social and economic historian Eileen Power, lived there for more than a year or two. But through this conceit of time and place, Wade somehow funnels accounts of modernist poetry and prose, as well as Russian and German Jewish intellectual refugees, ancient Greek scholarship, medieval economics, the League of Nations, Chinese art and imperial decline, Grand Guignol, Freud, the October revolution, the BBC’s educational lectures, a history of the London School of Economics, the rise of nazism, and a sympathetic portrait of a teddy bear. In the process she both reframes half a century of supposedly familiar literary and intellectual history and illustrates everything Woolf meant by “a room of one’s own”. Continue reading...
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