Olivia: Okay Jackson, you've read the book. Give me your five-word review. Jackson: Five brilliant women, one revolutionary address. Olivia: Ooh, I like that. Mine is: 'Their rooms, their rules, their legacy.' Jackson: Nice. It's clear we're not just talking about real estate today. Olivia: Definitely not. We are diving into Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade. And this book is a perfect example of what we love to explore—it’s a literary biography that’s also a profound piece of social and women’s history. Jackson: And it’s been widely acclaimed. It was longlisted for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize, which is a huge deal for non-fiction. Olivia: Exactly. The author, Francesca Wade, is a specialist in what’s called collective biography. She’s not just telling one person’s story; she’s weaving together the lives of five incredible, pioneering women: the poets H.D. and Virginia Woolf, detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classical scholar Jane Harrison, and historian Eileen Power. Jackson: But hold on, my understanding is that these five women didn't all live in Mecklenburgh Square at the same time. They weren't a club, they didn't all know each other. Some critics have pointed out that the connection is a bit tenuous. Is the book's premise a bit of a stretch? Olivia: That’s the perfect question to start with, because it gets right to the heart of Wade’s brilliant approach. The book isn't arguing they were a tight-knit group. Instead, it uses the square as a prism, a shared geographical and symbolic space, to explore a common aspiration. All five women, at different moments, came to this one London square seeking the same thing: a life of their own. Jackson: I see. So the square is the main character, in a way. It’s the stage where these individual dramas of independence played out. Olivia: Precisely. It’s a book about what Virginia Woolf famously called 'a room of one's own,' but magnified to the scale of an entire city block.

Jackson: Okay, so let's talk about that stage. What was so special about Mecklenburgh Square? Why there? Olivia: Well, the story of how Bloomsbury, the neighborhood where the square is located, became this intellectual and bohemian hub is fascinating. It was basically born from a failed real estate venture. Jackson: Of course it was. Tell me more. Olivia: In the early 1800s, the Duke of Bedford owned all this land and had a grand vision. He wanted to build an exclusive, upper-class suburb with grand townhouses for wealthy families. But he misread the market. The super-rich wanted to be in Mayfair or St. James, closer to the royal parks and exclusive shops. Jackson: They wanted the prime real estate, not the up-and-coming neighborhood. Olivia: Exactly. Then the railways came in, with huge stations at Euston and King's Cross, and the wealthy fled to the suburbs. So the Duke was left with all these grand, empty mansions. The satirical press at the time mocked Bloomsbury as a 'remote and half-discovered region.' Jackson: So it's a classic case of gentrification in reverse? The rich people left, and the artists and thinkers moved in. Olivia: That's a great way to put it. The failure to attract the elite meant rents plummeted. These huge houses, designed for a single family with a fleet of servants, were suddenly being carved up into flats, lodgings, and boardinghouses. And this happened right at the moment when a new demographic was emerging: the independent, educated, working woman. Jackson: The 'New Woman.' Olivia: Yes. Women were finally getting access to university, to professions, but they were still expected to live at home until they married. There was no 'father's house to my own flat' pipeline. It was father's house to husband's house. Bloomsbury changed that. A 1900 study of the area called it 'the beloved, the chosen of working women.' It was affordable, it was central, and it was filled with institutions like the British Museum Reading Room and University College London. Jackson: It was an entire ecosystem for intellectual life. Olivia: It was. And the book gives this perfect, vivid example with Virginia Woolf herself. Before she was the famous modernist, she was living in a stuffy, oppressive Victorian family home in Kensington. She described it as 'dark, dank,' a place where she was expected to serve her father and be paraded before potential suitors. Jackson: The classic 'angel in the house' trap. Olivia: Totally. But in 1904, at age twenty-two, she and her siblings made a radical break. They moved to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. And she wrote that 'everything was going to be different.' They painted the house 'fresh white' with a 'bright vermilion' front door. And for the first time, Virginia had her own private sitting room. Her friend gave her an inkpot as a housewarming gift. Jackson: A symbol of her new life as a writer. Olivia: And it worked. Within months, she published her first book reviews. She later wrote about the sheer joy of receiving her first payslip, exclaiming, "Now we are free women." Jackson: That's it right there. The 'room of one's own' isn't just a concept; it's a physical address, an escape hatch from the father's house. It's the key in the lock. Olivia: It's the key in the lock. And Mecklenburgh Square became one of the key places in Bloomsbury where women could find that key. It was a quiet enclave that was also a radical address.

Jackson: Okay, so they get the room. They have the key. They escape the family. But as the book makes brutally clear, that's not the end of the story. The drama just moves to a new address. Let's talk about the poet H.D. Olivia: Yes, her story is just astonishing. She lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square during World War I. The book describes this period as a 'Bacchic orgy of war-time love and death.' Her husband, the writer Richard Aldington, was away at the front, and their marriage was already falling apart. Jackson: This is where it gets really intense, right? Olivia: It does. H.D. is in London, pregnant, dealing with the trauma of a previous stillbirth she blamed on the war. And Aldington is writing to her from the trenches, not just with declarations of love, but also talking about his need for 'l'autre'—the other woman. He starts an affair. Jackson: That’s rough. But it gets worse. Olivia: Much worse. He comes back on leave and starts a second, more serious affair with a woman named Arabella Yorke. And the book is just devastating in its detail here. Jackson: Hold on. Her husband is having an affair, and then starts another one with the woman living in the flat directly below hers? In the same building? Olivia: In the same building. And H.D. is so broken down by this point, so desperate to avoid the 'trauma of sex' with him, that she acquiesces. In what the book calls a 'final gesture toward self-obliteration,' she offers Aldington and Arabella her main bedroom and retreats to a tiny, cramped garret room. She felt the 'four walls about to crush her.' Jackson: I can't even imagine the humiliation. The violation of her own sanctuary. Olivia: And to make it even more painful, Aldington writes her a letter trying to explain himself. He says he loves H.D. but desires Arabella, and he writes this absolutely soul-crushing line, which H.D. later put in her novel: "I would give her a mind, I would give you a body." Jackson: Wow. That is just unbelievably cruel. It's the ultimate act of reducing someone to a function, not a whole person. It perfectly captures that feeling of being fragmented by someone else's desires. Olivia: It’s a line that haunted H.D. for the rest of her life. She wrote that her only path to freedom was if she could 'live in two dimensions'—to be both mind and body, to be whole. And she spent decades processing this trauma through her writing, which she started in that very square. Jackson: That’s incredible. And the book creates this amazing echo, because another one of these five women lived in that exact same room, right? Olivia: In that exact same room, just a few years later. Dorothy L. Sayers, the brilliant creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, moves into 44 Mecklenburgh Square in 1920. And she's also there seeking independence, trying to make it as a writer. Jackson: But she has her own set of dramas. Olivia: Absolutely. She gets into this intense, unfulfilling relationship with a writer named John Cournos, who completely dismisses her work. He thought her detective stories were 'lowbrow nonsense.' He was this self-serious artist who couldn't see her genius. After that heartbreak, she has a brief, casual affair with another man, a charming but unreliable guy named Bill White. Jackson: And this is where the story takes another shocking turn. Olivia: It does. She becomes pregnant. And White, it turns out, is already married and wants nothing to do with it. Jackson: Wow. A secret child? In the 1920s. For a professional woman trying to build a career, that would have been social and financial ruin. The pressure must have been immense. Olivia: Immense. And Sayers, being the incredibly intelligent and strategic person she was, handled it like one of her own detective plots. She secretly arranged for the baby to be born, and then fostered by her cousin, telling almost no one. She kept this secret for her entire life. It was only revealed in a biography published nearly twenty years after her death. Jackson: That’s heartbreaking. To have to make that choice, to protect her hard-won independence. It shows you the stakes. These women weren't just fighting for a career; they were fighting for their very survival in a world that had no place for them.

Olivia: And that's the book's most profound insight. The square provided the physical space, the stage. It was the necessary first step. But the real battles these women fought were against forces much larger than a restrictive family. They were fighting, as Woolf put it, the 'tyrannies and servilities' of the entire world, both in public and in private. Jackson: It makes you realize that 'a room of one's own' is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for freedom. The real, messy, human work begins once you close the door. It's about navigating love, ambition, betrayal, and your own internal demons. Olivia: Exactly. The book opens with a vivid description of Mecklenburgh Square being bombed during the Blitz in 1940. Virginia Woolf's home is destroyed. And it’s such a powerful metaphor. These physical spaces, these rooms of their own, were fragile. They could be blown apart. But the intellectual and creative freedom they nurtured, the work that was done inside them, that legacy endures. Jackson: And Francesca Wade's book is an act of rebuilding that legacy, of excavating those stories from the rubble. Olivia: It is. It’s a reminder that history isn't just about 'great men' and wars. It's also, as Woolf said, about 'the feelings of women in a drawing-room'—or in this case, a Bloomsbury bedsit. And those feelings, those lives, are anything but insignificant. Jackson: It really makes you think, what are the 'squares' of today? Where do people find those communities to be brave and create, and what are the hidden battles they're still fighting within those walls? Olivia: A perfect question to end on. The struggles may look different, but the search for that space—and the courage to live freely within it—is timeless. Jackson: We'd love to hear your take. What did you think of these women's stories? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.