Faber & Faber (London 2020). 432 pages. Pbk. £8.99.
‘Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the City, and should still ask for more’ wrote Virginia Woolf (London Revisited, 1916). How true. The setting for this fascinating Group Biography is Mecklenburgh Square. I spent my student years in London and, looking back, I now regret how little exploring I did in those far off days when life was taken up with more matters of more pressing concern to a young woman entering higher education. Every Sunday I used to attend services at the University Church in Gordon Square, and would sometimes attend lectures at the nearby Senate House, totally unaware of the wealth of intellectual, literary and artistic connections waiting to be discovered in the residential squares nearby.
How reassuring, then, to read Vanessa Wade’s confession in the first chapter of her book that, although she had lived in London all her life, she had never heard of Mecklenburgh Square until she walked through it by chance one summer’s evening in 2013. Mecklenburgh Square has remained a quiet enclave on the eastern edge of Bloomsbury, separated from the better-known squares by Coram Fields and, since the 1960’s, by the Brunswick Centre. It is bounded by a graveyard (St George’s Gardens) and Gray’s Inn Road. Unusually for Bloomsbury, its central garden, hidden behind high hedges, remains locked to non-residents. Named in honour of King George III’s Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburgh-Strelitz, the Square and its garden were part of the Foundling Estate, a residential development on fields owned by the Foundling Hospital.
During the years which encompassed the two world wars, it was home to the five women writers whose stories form this book. Virginia Woolf arrived in 1939, Hilda Doolittle (known as HD) lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square during the first World War. In 1921, three years after HD had left the square, Dorothy L Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey in the very same room where HD had begun work on the autobiographical novel which would occupy her for the rest of her life. From 1926 to 1928, Jane Ellen Harrison, the pioneer of classical and anthropological studies, supported a Russian language literary magazine from the square. At number 20, between 1922 and 1940 the historian Eileen Power convened anti-fascist socialist meetings, scripted pacifist broadcasts for the BBC and hosted raucous parties in her kitchen. These women lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times though one or two knew each other and some were connected through shared interests, friends and even lovers, but they were not a ‘Bloomsbury Group’ in the usual sense of the term.
Wade’s purpose was to explore the idea that Mecklenburgh Square itself might hold within its history a female tradition of exactly the sort Woolf was looking for and described so well in A Room of One’s Own (1927): ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ In Mecklenburgh Square these five women who lived there between the wars found ‘rooms of their own’ and pushed the boundaries of scholarship, of literary form and societal norms; they refused to let their gender hold them back, but were determined to find a different way of living in which their creative work could take precedence. All the women in this book sought for recognition as serious contributors to their chosen fields in the face of gender prejudice and the mores of their times. Some found this more difficult than others.
Readers of this review will be familiar with Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L Sayers and possibly the poet Hilda Doolittle (known as HD), but the names of the other characters in the book may be less well known. I was certainly not aware of the achievements of Jane Ellen Harrison and Eileen Power. Eileen Power was a leading medieval historian of the interwar years. The classicist, Jane Harrison, who is perhaps best known today for her discovery of evidence for a prehistoric matriarchal religion, did not begin to receive the recognition she deserved until later in life. Regular attenders at our annual conference will be familiar with the name Gilbert Murray. Wade contrasts the ease with which a privileged young man like Murray achieved academic preferment to Jane Harrison’s hard struggle to achieve recognition which only came in later life.
Francesca Wade’s group biography made me want to learn more about Harrison, in particular, and I understand Mary Beard has written a biography of her. Any book that encourages further exploration of London’s literary, cultural and scientific heritage through ‘square haunting’ (Virginia Woolf’s phrase) is a welcome addition to the bookshelf.
Carol Palfrey is Secretary to SOF trustees and convenor of the Norwich SOF group.