square haunting by francesca wade

evening standard 16 january 2020

Group biographies are having something of a moment, and Virginia Woolf seems to feature in many of them. In her first book, Francesca Wade has taken the unusual step of not examining Woolf in the context of family, lovers or other members of the Bloomsbury Group, but positioning her alongside other radical women thinkers who lived in Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square between the wars. 

This area of London has been historically praised for its serenity, not least by Isabella in Jane Austen’s Emma, who comments: “Our part of London is very superior to most others! You must not confound us with London in general, my dear sir. The neighbourhood of Brunswick Square is very different from almost all the rest. We are so very airy!”

Of the five women featured, Woolf overshadows them all, and Wade tactfully places the chapter devoted to her last, possibly to avoid a sense of anti-climax. The poet Hilda Doolittle, who was nicknamed HD by her early boyfriend Ezra Pound, is first. Wade movingly shows what a triumph she ultimately made of a life blighted by a stillbirth and a nervous breakdown. 

D H Lawrence, when criticising her poetry, had told her to “kick over your tiresome house of life”. As Wade reflects, towards the end of her life, HD considered “her long and satisfying career, her happy relationships and many friends, her four grandchildren and the success of her final novel”.

“This is my House of Life,” HD wrote, “but it is not tiresome”. 

Bestselling crime novelist Dorothy L Sayers comes next. Her biography is perhaps the most intriguing, from her creative approach to satisfying her materialistic urges by giving her star character Lord Peter Wimsey the riches she desired (“When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six”), to the concealment of her pregnancy and the birth of her son (not only from her employers but from her loving parents as well). Many of the women who appear as bit-part players in the text display astonishing selflessness. Beatrice White, the wife of the man whom Sayers became pregnant by. Conscious that Sayers wanted the baby to be a secret, White arranged for her to give birth in her own hometown of Southbourne attended by White’s brother, a doctor. Sayers then gave the baby to her cousin Ivy, who made a living from fostering children. 

Wade’s next subject, scholar Jane Harrison, a respected Russophile, fails to enchant in spite of her quirkiness (she became devoted to her teddy bear), followed by Eileen Power, the intrepid world historian who crossed the Khyber Pass disguised as a man and held raucous kitchen dances. 

And there is Woolf, whom — against the odds — Wade manages to say something fresh about, rescuing her from those who view her life and work through the prism of her suicide. Wade’s version is a powerful corrective to the cliché of Woolf as a gloomy woman of letters. She rousingly evokes her joy at “street sauntering and square haunting”.

Ultimately, even if Wade’s subjects do not all captivate in equal measure, she conveys her sense of exhilaration at the autonomy they each fight for on almost every page.

This review first appeared in the Evening Standard