& still more from Mecklenburgh Sq.

This must be it surely it! The TLS podcast Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon has a bonus episode (an Apple link is the best I can do) of their extended interview with Francesca Wade about book Square Haunting that I have previously blogged on. Nothing here that she hasn’t necessarily said elsewhere, but just another nudge in the direction of reading about this really interesting collective (of four people – women) that Wade has put together (in one place – a London square).

Until I read the book, one final thought, it occurs to me how often Virginia Woolf uses “haunting” and associated words – things like “my old haunts” or “something/somebody haunted by” and of course “haunted houses” – and there is a wonderful 1927 essay entitled Street Haunting (I would guess this inspires Wade’s book title) which I know from The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays a collection published in 1942 by Leonard Woolf after his wife’s death, and which takes us on a delightful walk of London – and at the haunting hour! (A beautiful 1930 US edition is at The British Library, and here digitally.) I will keep this in mind as an idea to be pursued further, because I think there is a lot more to be said about Woolf and the ghosts that haunted her, and those that haunt us all.

Five Women & Mecklenburgh Square

Just published and brought to my notice by The Guardian, this interesting podcast from The Spectator (and embedded below) informs further on Francesca Wade’s just published first book Square Haunting (Faber, January 2020).

For the curious, the five eminent women are Virginia Woolf (writer, 1882–1941) Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. writer, poet 1886–1961), Dorothy L Sayers (writer, 1893–1957), Eileen Power (economist, historian 1889–1940) and Jane Harrison (classicist, 1850–1928), and the place is Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London. Wade presumably explores the changing role of women at the beginning of the 20th century through these exemplary lives, and in doing so discovers shared aspects of their lives.

Without referring to either book or podcast, off the top of my head I actually know of one obscure more than crossing of paths, being that between Woolf and Harrison. Virginia Woolf’s diaries (favourite often returned to reading of mine) reveal something of the relationship between her friend Hope Mirrlees and Mirrlees’ former tutor and then partner Harrison — their shared domestic and working lives and travels abroad. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in fact published Harrison’s memoirs in 1925.

Also, while Eileen Power may draw a blank with some (or many) I have actually come across Medieval English Nunneries in another context … but there must surely be more to tell, and I am looking forward to reading about it.