Cursed with hearts and brains
Five women writers in search of freedom
‘London itself’, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1928, ‘perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble save that of moving my legs through the streets.’ Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars (Faber/ Penguin Random House paperback, 2021) begins and ends with Woolf, whose last home in the city, 37 Mecklenburgh Square, was destroyed in the London Blitz of September 1940. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were at Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex at the time, and motored up a few days later to inspect the damage. There was not much to be salvaged, but Virginia managed to dig through the debris and retrieve twenty-four volumes of her diaries, ‘a great mass for my memoirs’, she declared.
Square Haunting is a compelling study of the quest for creative freedom, illustrated by the diverse lives of Woolf, H.D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison and Eileen Power. All lived at different times in the first half of the twentieth century in or near Mecklenburgh Square, ‘this dark, bristling heart of London’, according to D. H. Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod (1922). Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) provides the template for all five of the gripping stories told in Square Haunting: a move to a new place, a struggle to be taken seriously as a woman writer, a search for a different way of being.
H.D.
In 1911, the American poet Hilda Doolittle exchanged her life in Philadelphia for bohemian London. She became the modernist poet ‘H.D’. in 1913, after her friend Ezra Pound signed her poems ‘H.D. Imagiste’ and sent them off to be published in Poetry magazine. That year she married the English poet Richard Aldington, but the outbreak of war changed everything: their baby died at birth, and her marriage grew increasingly unhappy. In February 1916 she moved, alone, into a musty rented flat at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, where her poetic creativity was ‘choked by the undercurrent of death’, as she recalled later.
Matters were made worse when Aldington returned from the Front on leave and began sleeping with with Dorothy ‘Arabella’ Yorke in the flat upstairs. “I would give her a mind, I would give you a body’, the character of Rafe (a thinly disguised Aldington) tells his wife Julia in H.D.’s autobiographical novel Bid Me To Live (1960). In 1917 D. H. Lawrence sensed H.D.’s deep vulnerability, describing her as ‘like a person on a tightrope. You wonder if she’ll get across’. How she got across the gulf of self-doubt was, at least in part, by rejecting Lawrence’s poetic advice to her (‘his man-is-man, his woman-is-woman… shrill peacock-cry’). In this section of Square Haunting Wade skilfully unravels the mystery of the creative block that preoccupied H.D. for four decades.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers moved into the Mecklenburgh Square flat previously rented by H.D. in December 1920, and began to draft her first Lord Peter Wimsey book, Whose Body? She had recently completed her studies at Oxford and now felt ‘a kind of literary freak’ for wanting success as a detective novelist, especially after falling in love with the American writer John Cournos, who thought that she should dedicate her life to helping him with his (much more important, he felt) books. ‘I fear he has no sympathy with Lord Peter,’ Sayers wrote, ‘being the kind of man who takes his writing seriously and spells Art with a capital A.’
She took revenge by killing Cournos off in the character of the mendacious, self-aggrandizing Philip Boyes in Strong Poison (1930), the novel that introduced her fictional writer heroine Harriet Vane. Although Sayers only lived in the flat for a year, Mecklenburgh Square remained a symbol in her mind for a life devoted to creative endeavour: her novel Gaudy Night (1935) – praised by the TLS that year as ‘a discussion from every standpoint of the problem of Woman and the Intellectual Life’ – begins with Vane writing her best-selling detective novels at her desk, in her flat overlooking Mecklenburgh Square.
Francesca Wade offers sympathetic insights into the lived experiences of those women who are ‘cursed with both hearts and brains’, as Harriet Vane puts it.
Jane Ellen Harrison
Jane Ellen Harrison was a Cambridge scholar of ancient Greek. The classics were an intellectual territory normally inaccessible to women (‘I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek’, Clarissa Dalloway muses in Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out, 1915.) The literary magazine Time and Tide described Harrison as a woman who ‘dressed as she liked, theorised as she liked and taught as she liked’ and her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) revealed the importance of women in ancient Greek religion and gave Woolf and others a new, woman-centred view of history. D. H. Lawrence was fascinated by Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), although he suspected that it was written by ‘a school marmy woman’.
At the age of seventy-two Harrison decided to give up her comfortable Cambridge fellowship at Newnham College and start afresh, and she spent the last six years of her life living with her partner Hope Mirrlees among Russian political exiles in Paris and London. ‘We aspired to be citizens of the world’, Harrison wrote. The couple moved to a ‘tiny mousetrap of a house’ at 11 Mecklenburgh Street, just off the main square and together published The Book of the Bear (1926), their translation of twenty-one Russian tales. Harrison’s enduring passion for bears in all forms ‘was one of the psychological starting points of her love for Russia’, according to D. S. Mirsky.
Eileen Power
“When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own,” Woolf wrote, “I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.” The economic historian and medievalist Eileen Power lived at 20 Mecklenburgh Square from 1922 until 1940. She dressed stylishly, and her regular ‘kitchen dances’ were famous; at one party Virginia Woolf shared a packet of chocolate creams with the poet and civil servant Humbert Wolfe. Power was a lecturer at the London School of Economics and the author of Medieval People (1924) among other books, but her real passion was to bring history to a wider public with educational BBC broadcasts, books for children, lectures and popular articles. Socializing with economists, politicians, students and writers in Mecklenburgh Square was a vital part of her work. ‘I like people to be all different kinds’, Power told a friend in 1938, explaining why she had decided not to apply for a prestigious history professorship back in Cambridge, but stay in London. ‘I like dining with H. G. Wells one night, & a friend from the Foreign Office another, & a publisher a third & a professor a fourth.’ (more about Power in my post below)
How to go on
‘How to go on, through war? – that’s the question’, Virginia Woolf wrote soon after moving to 37 Mecklenburgh Square in August 1939. The answer was, as well as finishing her novel Between The Acts (published posthumously in 1941), to start work on several ambitious projects, including her memoir and a hybrid history of English literature. Against the background of constant air raids, Woolf re-read books by Jane Harrison and Eileen Power, and was fortified by the work of other women writers. But Woolf found writing in wartime London difficult, with worries about the Hogarth Press and ‘no gadding and flitting’ to see friends. ‘It is as if the song had stopped – the melody the necessary the voluntary’, Woolf wrote. ‘Odd if this should be the end of town life.’
But her connection to the city she loved continued through the memories that soothed her at her home in Rodmell in East Sussex. ‘The river. Say the Thames at London Bridge; and buying a notebook; and then walking along the Strand’.
Thank you for reading. This is an edited version of an essay first published in the TLS on 17 January 2020: ‘Cursed with hearts and brains: Female intellectuals and muses of the twentieth century’ (see TLS cover below).
Music for the eyes
It was a great treat to attend a performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah by the BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Singers this week. This snap was taken before the music started, making the most of the view of Tudor stonemasonry at its best. John Wastell was the master mason of the Chapel’s beautiful fan vaulting – ‘the noblest stone ceiling in existence’ – built between 1512 and 1515.
Recommended reading this week
‘I’m not an out-and-out fan of the Bloomsbury group’ writes
, ‘but there’s something about it all which appeals at this time of year. It’s a lot to do with the idea of brisk walks over the Sussex Downs or across London, warm fires, good books, colourful interiors, a daily timetable of structured bohemianism, and a lot of hard work punctuated with tea and muffins.’ (from ‘being more bloomsbury’)‘Autumn is my season, dear. It is, after all, the season of the soul’ (Letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Violet Dickinson c. July 1907) One of the evocative quotations in ‘Autumn Symphony: Colour the Season’,
’s beautiful selection of mid-twentieth century autumnal paintings.’s monthly themed reading lists are stuffed with brilliant suggestions, so I was thrilled to take part in this ‘Book talk: a memoir of grief and glamour’ with her recently.
So much here, thank you! Loved the quotes from Virginia Woolf especially — they're moving, somehow. (Incidentally, there was interesting podcast in September by the London Review of Books with Mary Beard, talking about Jane Ellen Harrison and the origins of the more colorful stories about her. Fun to listen to. The title of the podcast episode is “The Cleverest Woman in England,” and I think that I Iistened to it because I had read the phrase here first, in a different context.) Now to read the piece on Eileen Powell!
Such an excellent piece as always. I had forgotten about this book and have now ordered it! Thank you for the reminder and such an absorbing essay.