Books beget books. One book may often send a reader back to other books. Sometimes it might be to an old favorite; other times it might be a title a reader never heard of.
Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars is such a book. This splendid biographical critical study of the minds and missions of five singular women — H. D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf — is a definitive exploration of the poet, novelist, classicist, economic historian, and writer/publisher. From 1916 to 1940, each person lived in various addresses on Mecklenburgh Square in London’s Bloomsbury area.
After H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) left her stifling life in Pennsylvania — from her childhood in Bethlehem and Philadelphia to a confining education at Bryn Mawr (“’I didn’t like it.’”) and her broken engagement to Ezra Pound —in 1911 she sailed to Europe, finally settling into 44 Mecklenburgh Square searching for “’freedom of mind and spirit.’”
A few years later, in 1920, Sayers rented the same address. There, after being the first female graduate of Oxford, she would eventually create one of the most successful series of crime novels in the Golden Age of Mysteries. Although Peter Wimsey was her legendary amateur detective, it was the creation of Harriet Vane who became most representative of Sayers’s rebellion against the “norms of femininity.” She was drawn to the “eccentric environment” of the Square because her landlady, Elinor James, “thoroughly [understood] that one wants to be quite independent.”
It was that same spirit of independence that took the well-known and beloved classics don, Jane Ellen Harrison, to number 11 from 1926 to 1928, her indomitable personality already captured by Augustus John in a 1909 portrait of her reclining on a chaise, eyes lifted in contemplation. At 59, she was to the painter a “puzzle to paint.” Although H.D. and Sayers were young when they took up residence, Harrison was 75, but this was a new beginning for her, too, away from the constraints of Cambridge where she dealt with the usual frustrating machinations of academic politics. Despite her credentials, she struggled against the patriarchy to gain faculty positions. She popularized “perambulating lectures” on “ancient festivals, dances and sacrifices” and “smoked a pipe on the steps of the Parthenon.”
The longest resident of the Square (at number 20 from 1922 to 1940), Power rewrote history from an economic point of view. Her perspective came from a “strong desire to change the common conception of history as ‘the biographies of great men,’” and to shatter the assumption that “to speak of ordinary people [was] beneath the dignity of history.’” Her lifetime of work “offered fertile proof that women’s subordination was carefully constructed over time.”
Virginia Woolf’s occupation of 37 Mecklenburgh was the shortest stay, from 1939 to 1940. Her move, unlike the others, was not predicated on making an epiphanal discovery or a philosophical statement of existential purpose. She had already established her reputation through novels and the sine qua non statement of the essential requirements for being an independent person in her ground-breaking essay based upon papers delivered at Newnham College, Cambridge, A Room of One’s Own (1928).
Woolf’s manifesto, along with the topographical connection, serves as the cornerstone to Wade’s linkage of the five women.
With that in mind, after engaging (for the first or subsequent time) with the brief but cogent argument of A Room of One’s Own, the reader might best be served by looking at H.D.’s roman a clef, Bid Me To Live (1960). Although best known as one of the earliest proponents of imagist poetry, H.D.’s novel takes its title from a Robert Herrick (most often remembered for the opening carpe diem line of “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”) poem, “To Anthea. Who May Command Him Anything,” and carries the subtitle, “A Madrigal.” Wade labels this narrative in several voices the quintessential novel of the Square, “a compelling work of late modernism, shot through with a dreamlike surrealism.”
As a “dissection of the unlikely ménage that occupied the flat,” H.D. asserts that it is “completely autobiographical.” There are potentially libelous portraits of H.D.’s husband and associate imagist poet, Richard Aldington; of his lover, Arabella Yorke; of Pound and D. H. and Frieda Lawrence.
Then there is the disarming The Book of the Bear (1926), “[b]eing Twenty-one Tales newly translated from the Russian” by Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees. A group of Harrison’s students gifted her with a “bespectacled teddy bear, which she called Herr Professor or the Old One,” which she kept “in a place of pride” on her mantelpiece.
This is a resplendent anthology of bear stories that stems from Harrison’s scholarly interest in history, Russia, totemism, and a friendship with Alexey Remizov (an exiled writer). A Preface outlines the social and ethnic characteristics of the bear, not as animal, but as emblematic spirit. The slim volume is illustrated throughout with eight colorful woodcuts by Ray Garnett.
These are not fables but folk tales without morals. Even the classic “The Three Bears” (in a version by Tolstoy) is restored as a simple story of a curious child who disrupts the bear family’s usually relaxing, routine life. Pushkin’s “Fragment of a Bylina” (a story of What-has-been) and Remizov’s “The Bear’s Lullaby” (complete with a few bars of music) are included here.
A Prologue and a separate Introduction — “In the Square” — to Wade’s text establishes the premise and format of her argument for using “women’s private homes as a starting point for an investigation into their public lives.” She quotes Woolf to explain how each of these writers was committed to “intellectual freedom … to the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s own pursuits.” It is not just coincidence that each discovered her foundations in an area known for intellectual and personal achievement.
For H.D., her flat becomes a refuge, her own room where like her alter ego character, Julia, in Bid Me To Live, can be “free to live in two dimensions.” Where, as Wade states it, “real freedom entails the ability to live on one’s own terms, not to allow one’s identity to be proscribed or limited by anyone else.”
Her section in Square Haunting illuminates how her personal life and relationships — from Pound to Aldington to Lawrence — influenced her work. It provides insight into a not uncommon cannibalism of a writer’s androgynous mind. As H.D. achieved by reimaging Helen, in Helen in Egypt, Wade reimagines H.D. as a “character who emerges as a complex whole.” As the “passive, objectified Helen of tradition can never be read in the same way again,” (H.D. can never again be seen as a woman with a subordinate position in society.
Sayers, too, sought a new vision for women. But not just for women but for the standard attitude towards crime fiction. She was 27 before she received her first-class degree in modern languages from Somerville College, five years after she completed her studies because women were not granted separate degrees. She becomes the “doyenne of detective fiction” by determining that “[s]ettling down is as unsettling as being unsettled.”
Lord Peter Wimsey, with his monocle and rare-book collection, represents for Sayers the kind of detective who is “’really the last of the great heroes who have stood up for civilization against disorder and invasion.’” From Whose Body? (1923) to Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), Sayers insisted that detective novels should be like any other literary fiction and “contain atmosphere, character, human truth and a driving force beyond the mechanics of plot.”
As she was working out her new normal of crime novels, Sayers was also, like H.D., working through a series of relationships that she could draw on for her stories. A secret pregnancy in 1923 was unknown by the public; she gave the son to be raised by a cousin as the cost of being unwilling to compromise her professional and creative life for personal reasons. The synergy of literature demanded “how a woman [could] live without having to compromise between intellectual and emotional fulfillment, between a desire to write and the bounds of accepted femininity.”
For Harrison and Power, both iconoclasts in their own disciplines, that meant redefining classics and economics from a distinctly feminist perspective.
Harrison, a linguist, translator, and renowned Cambridge professor, intended to “search for alternative cults to the Olympian pantheon.” Friedrich Nietzsche (in The Birth of Tragedy) and James George Frazer (in his popular The Golden Bough) before her set out to “show that ancient religions revolved around the worship and sacrifice of a mystic king who died at harvest and was reborn in the spring.” While both of their works “focused on male deities and archetypes,” Harrison postulated that the “origins of the well-known myths lay in a much older worship, anchored in emotion and community spirit, centered around rituals designed to ward off evil and celebrate the changing seasons, and which placed the greatest importance on women.”
Harrison’s major works — Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912) — based on her archeological digs promulgated that “an array of powerful goddesses–Hera at Argos, Athena at Athens, Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, Gaia at Delphi — once reigned alone over cult shrines.” She found evidence of a “different world order, where descent was traced through the mother’s family, where women’s activities formed the heart of community life, and where ‘matriarchal, husbandless goddesses’ were not mocked or feared but reverently worshipped.”
As an archeologist of language, her studies were a key influence on modernist writers who sought to “reread history through the lens of gender and power.” Her ideas pervade T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” and the characterization of female protagonists from E. M. Forster’s Schlegel sisters in Howards End to James Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Brangwens in Women in Love, and Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. A poem and more books that readers might turn to.
Wade directly connects Harrison to Woolf in a meeting at Newnham where Woolf heard Harrison lecture on a “new, subversive model of history.” She “offered Woolf an alternative lineage in which she could see herself reflected: a different Cambridge, a different Bloomsbury, a different approach to history, and the possibility of a different future.” In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf refers to Harrison as “the famous scholar, a bent figure, formidable yet humble.”
Like Harrison, Power established her own ideals and goals, to “forge a new image for a woman intellectual, and create a way of living for which there was little precedent.” The new woman would not be seen as the “stereotype of a dowdy bluestocking, but as a professional who could entertain an international reputation while also enjoying fashion and frivolity, whose public status was defined not by her family but by her work.”
If H. D. “wanted to find a universal voice unmarked by gender” and Sayers “pondered a suitable balance for women ‘cursed with both hearts and brains,’” then Power “sought the freedom to be contradictory and yet whole.”
Power did this by changing the “common conception of history as ‘the biographies of great men’ and [shattering] the assumption that “’to speak of ordinary people [was] beneath the dignity of history.’”
In the crucible of economic annals, Power was able to fortify her positions towards “feminism, pacifism, and internationalism” (while maintaining a commitment to her own sense of independence. Her astute studies of the past illuminated problems in her own period, from revealing how the medieval cloth industy revealed parallels to the financial basis of Soviet Russia, to the rise of capitalism in Asia, and nationalisim in Europe. She found a direct line from the 1645 introduction of the turnip in England to the Industrial Revolution. (209) In a lecture delivered to the London School of Economics in 1933, she asserted that “’the main business of the historian whose work lies in a school of social studies” is to contribute “data and methodology for the express purpose of elucidating the present.”
The last section of Square Haunting focuses on probably the most familiar name in the group of five.
Having established that Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is the lynchpin of Wade’s historical analysis of the other women writers, she goes on to inform Woolf’s novels through her time at 37 Mecklenburgh Square. Unlike H.D., Sayers, Harrison, and Power, who sought the location in need of professional and philosophical need, Woolf and her husband, Leonard, needed a place to stay. They were driven out of their house at Tavistock Square by construction noises on a nearby hotel. They transferred all their personal possessions, along with the manuscripts and printing devices for the Hogarth Press which served the function of an “egalitarian workplace.”
Wade relies on Woolf’s diary entries, critical interpretation of the novels, and her own skills at characterization based on life events to create an indelible portrait of the Bloomsbury icon. Woolf’s passion for biography turns her experiences into memorable fiction “populated by characters whose sense of self is uncertain, their inner lives at odds with the personae they present to the outside world.” This discrepancy between private and public image is one of Wade’s prominent themes.
Although Woolf’s early novels — The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) — were “fairly conventional” in form she took Roger Fry’s suggestion that art and literature could express the “’imaginative life rather than [be] a copy of actual life.’” That led to her distinctive stream of consciousness technique that she felt mimicked in prose the post-impressionism of Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. She extended her experimentation into her approach to biography which “evolved along-side her view of character in fiction.” (A new century brought social freedoms and a new biographical concept that “swapped lifeless panegyric for shorter, more self-aware studies interested in character rather than deeds.”
Subsequent projects brought her closer to the circle of Harrison and H.D.. She considered autobiography a “potent weapon for women’s freedom,” encouraging Harrison to publish her Reminiscenes with Hogarth. Like H. D., she saw the autobiography as a “means of countering the narratives so often imposed on women’s lives from the outside.”
Later novels, like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) underscored her use of the form that “allowed her to be impressionistic, authentic and self-aware.”
All of that culminated in the monumentally influential A Room of One’s Own (1929). There she pronounced her historic rallying cry for a separate room and five hundred pounds a year which would provide independence and stand “for power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.”
Near the end of her life she conceived of a Common History book that would explore “the effect of country upon writers.” It was to begin in earliest England then “find the ball of string & wind out.” It would pass from criticism to biography. Like Mecklenburgh Square itself, it would reset the boundaries of history for women. And, it would “[let] one book suggest another.”
In addition to everything else that is what Square Haunting does. It proves that the Square was a street that fostered potential and possibilities.
Biographies can be tricky. As Wade notes, they only offer “one version of a life.” In The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes’ disarming literary approach to the Belle Epoque and three notorious Frenchman, he defines the form as “a collection of holes tied together with string.” He often cites the biographer’s refrain, “We cannot know.” Some facts are surmised. Some holes are emptier than others.
Wade manages to avoid most of the pitfalls of the literary biographer. Her book complements Bill Goldstein’s The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature, a cogent compendium that examines the contributions of four giants of literature (all of whom play a part in Wade’s book) largely responsible for the creation of modern literature.
[Published by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of Random House, on April 7, 2020, 432 pages, hardcover, $28.99]