Square Haunting

‘Outstanding. I’ll be recommending this all year.’ – Sarah Bakewell
‘A beautiful and deeply moving book.’ – Sally Rooney

‘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.

‘Elegant, erudite and absorbing, Square Haunting is a startlingly original debut, and Francesca Wade is a writer to watch.’ – Frances Wilson
‘A fascinating voyage through the lives of five remarkable women – a moving and immersive portrait.’ – Edmund Gordon

Author Biography

Francesca Wade has written for publications including the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, New Statesman and Prospect. She is editor of The White Review, and winner of the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. Square Haunting is her first book. She lives in London.