Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 11 reviews on
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY POPMATTERS
"I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting."--Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925
In the early twentieth century, Mecklenburgh Square--a hidden architectural gem in the heart of London--was a radical address. On the outskirts of Bloomsbury known for the eponymous group who "lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles," the square was home to students, struggling artists, and revolutionaries.
In the pivotal era between the two world wars, the lives of five remarkable women intertwined at this one address: modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf. In an era when women's freedoms were fast expanding, they each sought a space where they could live, love, and--above all--work independently.
With sparkling insight and a novelistic style, Francesca Wade sheds new light on a group of artists and thinkers whose pioneering work would enrich the possibilities of women's lives for generations to come.
Praise for Square Haunting
"A fascinating voyage through the lives of five remarkable women . . . moving and immersive."--Edmund Gordon, author of The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
"Elegant, erudite, and absorbing, Square Haunting is a startlingly original debut, and Francesca Wade is an author to watch."--Frances Wilson, author of Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
"Outstanding . . . I'll be recommending this all year."--Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café
"I much enjoyed Francesca Wade's book. It almost made me wish I belonged to the pioneering generation of women spoiling eggs on the gas ring and breaking taboos."--Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
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Square Haunting reviewed: Francesca Wade focuses on the lives of five women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, between 1916 and 1940 – including LSE's second woman Professor of Economic History, Eileen Power http://ow.ly/p07950yDGj7
Posing urgent questions about the world we live in. Projects include Festival of Ideas, Festival of Economics and Festival of the Future City.
A Sultry Month by Alethea Hayter is a terrific book and good to see it back in print from @FaberBooks with an introduction by @francescawade (her Square Haunting is highly recommended). https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/524ba220-fbb0-11ec-88db-ae1b6b9bdd3e?shareToken=2818acf0e6e41dd5ac3f32230362a99f
Freelance writer, researching lives & work of Cambridge women 1869-1947. Reviews & essays in @TheTLS, @GuardianBooks, @foxedquarterly, @HistoryToday etc
First published in 1915, Jane Harrison's Peace With Patriotism was an important source for Virginia Woolf’s later anti-war essay, Three Guineas (1938) - see @francescawade's excellent chapters on Harrison & Woolf in Square Haunting (2020) @FaberBooks https://t.co/wVPlFbU4Za
"Square Haunting is at once a tribute to Virginia Woolf's powerful concept of a woman's need for a room of her own, and an exploration of the contradictions and messy compromises so often involved in fulfilling that need. . . . A very readable and enjoyable book."--Margaret Drabble, The New Statesman
"Captivating . . . superb . . . Wade has pulled off a remarkable feat of intellectual and social history with her erudite yet juicy first book. . . . An engaging narrative, movingly bookended by descriptions of the obliteration of a world she so vividly evokes. . . . This impressive feminist history stands as an elegiac love letter to a bygone time and place that offered brilliant, iconoclastic women a unique opportunity for freedom and self-expression."--Wall Street Journal
"Endlessly interesting, unshowy, tightly argued and large-hearted. . . . The women's characters and situations leap off the page, helped by the kind of details--from interior décor to what they wore--that bring prose alive. . . . Wade reframes half a century of supposedly familiar literary and intellectual history and illustrates everything Woolf meant by 'a room of one's own'."--Aida Edemariam, The Guardian
"Powerful . . . Just as Harrison and Power rewrote history to include the lives of forgotten women, so Wade reestablishes the importance of thinkers like Power and H.D., whose legacies have been eclipsed by those of their male contemporaries."--The New Yorker
"Serious, stylish . . . It is a pleasure to fall into step with the eloquent, elegant Wade as she stamps the streets of literary London. I would give a copy to every young woman graduating from university and wondering who and how to be."--Laura Freeman, The Times
"Rich and powerful."--Ruth Franklin, Harper's
"Original and erudite. . . . Wade is adept at evoking the gritty texture of the times, taking us seamlessly from the interior lives of her subjects into the world they inhabited and back again. . . . Wade distils half a century of social and literary history into these five women's lives with a marvellously light touch. This is biography as fresh and engaging as you are likely to find."--Ariane Bankes, The Spectator