The Book Club: the women of Mecklenburgh Square

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Sam's guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Francesca Wade, whose fascinating first book Square Haunting tells the intersecting stories of five eminent women who lived during the years of and between the world wars in London’s Mecklenburgh Square: Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, Dorothy L Sayers, Eileen Power and Jane Harrison. In each case, their years in Bloomsbury marked a moment of professional self-invention or reinvention — and of personal trial. Together, they tell the story of a changing way of being for women in the world, and the exhilaration and sometimes painful cost of achieving 'a room of one’s own'.

The Book Club, what used to be known as Spectator Books, is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.6	Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator.
0:26.1	This week I'm very, very pleased to be joined by Francesca Wade, whose first book is called, well, I want to call it Square Haunting, but it's actually Square Haunting, presumably.
0:36.7	And it's a kind of group biography of
0:39.2	five very eminent women who lived between the beginning of the First World War and the end of
0:44.1	the Second World War, in, you know, fits and patches, in Mecklenburg Square, in Mecklenburg,
0:50.3	in Bloomsbury. I don't think they knew how to spell it, let's alone say it.
0:54.8	There's a lot of old spellings in this book.
0:57.4	Francesca, to start with the square.
0:59.1	What was, you know, how did you hit on that kind of central thing for this group biography?
1:06.1	Well, Mecklenburg Square is right out on the eastern edge of Bloomsbury.
1:10.3	So even though it's very central within London, it's a slightly hidden kind of enclave.
1:15.8	It's not really a thoroughfare.
1:17.0	So I, although I lived in London all my life, hadn't really been through it until I passed through on my way to check out the Blue Plac for HD, who I studied at university.
1:27.7	And while I was there, I was amazed, wandering around, looking up at these houses.
1:31.9	And I realised I'd learned that Virginia Woolf, another of my favourite writers, had lived in the very same place.
1:38.5	And when I did a bit more research later, I realised that several other interesting women writers,
1:43.8	some of whom I hadn't heard of,
1:45.2	had lived in the square as well. And I started to wonder what had brought them all there.
1:50.8	And I began to think about Wolf's Essay, a Room of One's Own, which had always been a very
	...

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