I bought this book pretty much as soon as it was published, and then in languished in my pile (pile of death my daughter calls it), but my random number generator selected it, and do I read it. Of the 60 books I have read so far this year, only 22 have been from the pile – I would like it to be half.
Here’s the blurb …
I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting.Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925
Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently.
Francesca Wade’s spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.
Of the five women I knew two, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers. I haven’t read any of Sayer’s work, but I have just started listening to Whose Body?, which I am very much enjoying.
The other three women were amazing, H. D (Hilda Doolittle), Jane Harrison, and Eileen Power were amazing and it’s appalling that they are so little known today. Eileen Power, in particular, was extremely prescient, discussing the East West divide and how dangerous it could be, and how divisive the dividing of the muslim countries by the allies after world was one would be.
These were liberated women trying to live independent lives – equal to men. They were interested in learning, and creating a better world, and believed that female involvement (collaboration and co-operation) was the way to do that.
The writing is lovely, it is very easy to read.
A review
