Square Haunting takes up Woolf’s call for a different sort of history: it is a biography of five great women, about feelings and drawing rooms, but also about work, politics, literature and community. And, indeed, about war, which affected each of these lives deeply. [loc. 446]
Square Haunting (the title's taken from a line in Virginia woolf's diaries) focuses on five independent, intellectual women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, between the first and second world wars. Beginning with HD (Hilda Doolittle) who lived there from 1916-1918, the book continues with Dorothy Sayers (who lived in the same rooms that HD had rented), then historian and economist Eileen Power; classicist Jane Harrison, who set up home with Hope Mirrlees; and finally a brief residency by Virgina Woolf.
The book focusses on the time spent in the Square, but isn't always limited to that time: there is much about Harrison's life at Girton prior to her move to London, and about Woolf's time in Sussex. Still, the author's main concern is with these five women, and their struggles to balance hearts and brains, to achieve independence of thought and deed and emotion without compromising themselves. (This endeavour was greatly aided, at least for some of them, by the employment of domestic staff.)
There are connections, some more tenuous than others, between the women. Woolf and Harrison were friends, and Harrison's work was published by the Woolf-owned Hogarth Press; Sayers and HD both had one-sided relationships with translator John Cournos (HD rejected him, and he rejected Sayers, who may have based the character of Philip Boyes, in Strong Poison, on him; also worth noting is Harriet Vane's residence on Mecklenburgh Square.) Sayers and Power discussed Roman rule in Palestine at a party; Woolf ate chocolate creams in Power's kitchen. But the book is about the women, not their friends or relationships, and indeed the predictable 'big names' (T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, D H Lawrence, Freud) are mentioned only in passing, when relevant.
I wasn't familiar with Power (though I believe I read her Medieval Women at university) and found her emphasis on social and domestic history fascinating. More familiar with the others, but I still learnt a lot: I hadn't known that Sayers had an illegitimate son (whose father's wife sounds absolutely amazing: she helped and supported Sayers during the pregnancy); I wasn't aware of just how fraught HD's marriage to Richard Aldington had been; and I hadn't realised that Harrison had burnt all her papers and effectively eloped to London with Hope Mirrlees, reinventing herself in her seventies.
A fascinating read, especially the framing chapters: the book opens with the bombing of Mecklenburgh Square during the Blitz, and closes with a description of a 'living memorial' to Woolf:
Researchers have established, as far as possible, exactly where Virginia Woolf’s study at 37 Mecklenburgh Square would have sat within the modern building [of Goodenough College]. Now, that room is given over each year to a woman student...[who] finds a book sitting on the desk, ready for her to turn the first page: A Room of One’s Own. [loc 4937]
(Also see Goodenough News, Autumn 2015, page 14.)
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