Narrator: In the dead of night on September 10, 1940, a German air raid tore through the heart of London. In Mecklenburgh Square, a historic Bloomsbury enclave, writer John Lehmann watched from his window as an "enormous bellying cloud of grey dust" advanced down the road like a living thing. The blast had sliced a nearby nurses' home open like a doll’s house. The next morning, a warden meticulously logged the surreal details of the aftermath: "09:26 Mr. Jackson, No. 8 Mecklenburgh Square, fed cat." A few entries later: "Dead body. Female." When Virginia Woolf arrived, she found her former homes reduced to rubble and her current flat at number 37 uninhabitable. Kneeling in the debris, she salvaged the twenty-four volumes of her diary, her triumphant cry—"a great mass for my memoirs"—a small act of preservation against the overwhelming destruction.

What was lost that night was more than just buildings; it was the physical heart of a revolutionary experiment in living. In her book Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, Francesca Wade uncovers the "unrecorded life" that flourished in this quiet corner of London. She reveals how, in the turbulent years between the two World Wars, Mecklenburgh Square became a crucible for five extraordinary women—H.D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf—as they forged new paths to creative and personal freedom.

Narrator: The book’s central argument is that intellectual freedom depends on material things. For the women of the early 20th century, this meant having what Virginia Woolf famously articulated as "a room of one's own and five hundred a year." Mecklenburgh Square, and Bloomsbury more broadly, became a real-world manifestation of this ideal. It was a place where a confluence of historical forces created a unique opportunity for female independence.

The failure of Bloomsbury to develop into the exclusive, upper-class suburb its aristocratic planners had envisioned in the 19th century inadvertently created the conditions for its later, more radical identity. The grand but under-occupied houses led to lower rents and the rise of boardinghouses and flats. This was a lifeline for the so-called "Surplus Women" of the post-WWI era, a generation of nearly two million women who, due to demographic imbalance, would not marry. Armed with new legal rights, like the vote and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, these women sought careers and independent lives. A 1900 study declared Bloomsbury "the beloved, the chosen of working women," a place where one could find an affordable room and the freedom of a personal latchkey.

Virginia Woolf’s own story is a powerful illustration. She described her childhood home in respectable Kensington as a dark, stifling Victorian cage. Her move to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury in 1904 was a profound liberation. In a house painted fresh white, she finally had her own sitting room and, within months, published her first book reviews. As she happily exclaimed upon receiving her first payslip, "Now we are free women." Mecklenburgh Square offered this same promise: a physical and intellectual space where women could escape the confines of the traditional home and begin to build a life, and a world, on their own terms.

Narrator: For the women of Square Haunting, the square was not just a quiet refuge; it was a site of intense creation and profound personal crisis, where the high stakes of their unconventional lives played out. The very same rooms could witness both the birth of a literary icon and the depths of human betrayal.

In 1921, a young Dorothy L. Sayers lived in a "lovely Georgian room" at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. Financially precarious and emotionally bruised from a difficult relationship, she was determined to become a writer. It was here, inspired by the city and her own research into real-life crimes, that she began drafting her first detective novel, Whose Body?. She created the debonair aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey, whose vast fortune she admitted was a delightful fantasy to indulge in while she herself was "particularly hard up." That room was the birthplace of a character who would make her famous and financially independent.

Just a few years earlier, in that same building, the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) endured one of the most traumatic periods of her life. With her husband Richard Aldington away at the front, she suffered his infidelity, which took place in the flat below hers. In a gesture of what she called "self-obliteration," she retreated to a tiny garret room, feeling the "four walls about to crush her." It was also here that the writer D.H. Lawrence, a complex and domineering friend, challenged her artistic scope, telling her to "stick to the woman speaking" and not attempt to write from a male perspective. This period of intense personal pain and artistic challenge became the "psychic weeds" she would spend decades untangling through psychoanalysis and her autobiographical novel, Bid Me to Live. The square was a place of radical possibility, but that freedom came with immense vulnerability.

Narrator: The independence these women found in Mecklenburgh Square was not an end in itself. It was the foundation from which they built public careers that challenged conventions and engaged with the most pressing issues of their day. They used their "room of one's own" to look out at the world and demand a new place within it.

Eileen Power, a resident of 20 Mecklenburgh Square, became a pioneering economic historian and public intellectual. As the first woman to win the prestigious Albert Kahn Traveling Fellowship, she journeyed across the globe, meeting Mahatma Gandhi in India and crossing the Khyber Pass in male disguise. This experience solidified her commitment to internationalism and a "living history" that focused on the lives of ordinary people, not just "great men." At the London School of Economics, she was a force, challenging the stereotype of the "dowdy bluestocking" with her sharp intellect, wit, and fashionable style. She used her platform to advocate for pacifism, resist the rise of fascism, and argue that history should be a tool for "elucidating the present."

Similarly, Dorothy L. Sayers refused to be defined by her commercial success. During World War II, she grew frustrated with the "detective story attitude to life," which offered neat solutions to problems like "sin, death and the night-bomber." She turned her formidable intellect to theology and scholarship, producing a controversial but wildly popular radio drama on the life of Christ for the BBC. Her greatest achievement, in her own eyes, was her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When critics dismissed her as a "detective novelist" who had merely "taken up" theology, she fiercely retorted that she was, and always had been, a "poet and scholar." For both Power and Sayers, the independence won in the square was a launchpad for claiming intellectual authority on a global stage.

Narrator: The book opens with the destruction of Mecklenburgh Square, and it closes by examining the end of this unique era, marked by the devastation of World War II and the subsequent fates of its pioneering women. The war that shattered the square’s physical form also irrevocably altered their lives and legacies.

Virginia Woolf’s final years were spent at 37 Mecklenburgh Square, a period of intense anxiety but also feverish creativity. The constant threat of bombing forced her into an "exile" at her Sussex home, Monk's House. The destruction of her London homes severed a deep connection to the city she called "the passion of my life." While she found a paradoxical freedom in the enforced solitude, the cumulative strain of the war exacerbated her recurring depression, leading to her tragic suicide in March 1941.

The post-war era saw the square itself transformed. Despite protests from remaining residents, the north side was demolished to make way for an expansion of London House, an international student residence that would become Goodenough College. The bohemian, intellectual hub was replaced by a modern institution. The legacies of the women also faced their own forms of reconstruction and erasure. Eileen Power’s groundbreaking work was for a time overshadowed by that of her husband. Hope Mirrlees, the brilliant companion of classicist Jane Harrison, retreated into obscurity and died without an obituary. It was only through the dedicated work of later scholars and biographers that their full contributions were brought back into the light, a process that often involved uncovering painful secrets, like Dorothy L. Sayers’s illegitimate son, whose existence was revealed only after her death.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Square Haunting is that intellectual and creative freedom is not an abstract concept; it is built upon the concrete foundations of money, space, and community. By chronicling the lives of five women who sought and found these foundations in a specific London square, Francesca Wade demonstrates how a physical place can become a powerful symbol of liberation. These women were not simply residents; they were architects of a new way of living, proving that a woman’s life could be centered on her own intellectual and creative ambitions.

The book leaves us with a powerful challenge. As Virginia Woolf once wrote, history has for too long been the story of the "male line," leaving the "unmarked tracks" of women's lives to fade. Wade’s work is an act of recovery, a map of one small but vital territory. It prompts us to look at the buildings and squares of our own cities and ask: whose unrecorded lives and forgotten stories are waiting to be discovered in the spaces we pass every day?