Square Haunting by Francesca Wade review – female autonomy between the wars

When Dorothy L Sayers’s fictional mystery writer Harriet Vane returns from her adventures in Europe, she takes up residence in a one-bedroom flat in Mecklenburgh Square, an elegant, tucked-away Georgian square in Bloomsbury. Harriet is fiercely independent for a woman in the 1930s – clever, bold and making a tidy income for herself. As Francesca Wade writes, “her address represents the self-sufficiency Harriet prizes so dearly”. Sayers gave her unconventional heroine the same WC1 address as she had when she first moved to London because “it remained a byword in her mind for a life devoted to intellectual endeavour”.

And as Wade discovered when she stumbled by chance upon this small, leafy enclave six years ago, Mecklenburgh Square was home to five radical female writers at various times between the world wars. The modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (known as HD), the maverick classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, the economic historian Eileen Power and the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf also lived there.

These properties, within striking distance of the British Museum and Coram’s Fields, now sell for millions but back then they housed poor families, prostitutes, artists, radicals and – heavens! – working women. At the turn of the 20th century, the lives of middle-class girls were changing fast and for many, the immediate goal was no longer an advantageous marriage but somewhere to think and learn uninterrupted. “At last, here was a district of the city where a room of one’s own could be procured,” Wade says, echoing Woolf. Her book takes its title from a 1925 diary entry, in which Woolf extols the pleasures of “street sauntering and square haunting”.

There have been an endless stream of group biographies published over the last decade, including many that seek to give headstrong women their due. You know the type: Five Feisty Females Who Dared to Have an Opinion and Changed the World. Charming, intermittently interesting but hardly illuminating. Square Haunting is, moreover, a feminist, psycho-geographical, cross-generational group biography (tick, tick, tick!). Haven’t we just had another treatment of Dorothy L Sayers and her Oxford cohort in Mo Moulton’s Mutual Admiration Society? And surely we have sucked every last shred of marrow from Virginia Woolf’s poor old bones.

But Wade’s book rises above the publishing cliches to tell a deeper story about women’s autonomy in the early 20th century, about their work and education, politics and activism. What emerges is an eloquent, pellucid, sometimes poignant study of five female intellectuals, each of whom disdained convention to fulfil their potential as thinkers and writers.

In 1916, imagist poet HD moved into number 44, where, in a musty rented flat filled with wilted roses and overfilled ashtrays, she began an autobiographical novel cycle that explored her troubled marriage. Two years after HD’s departure, Sayers took over the same rooms, where she wrote the first of her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and endured romantic disappointment that left her painfully aware of the precariousness of women’s independence.

In 1922, the pacifist historian Eileen Power moved into number 20 and held raucous kitchen dances as well as socialist meetings about resisting future fascism. The Cambridge University classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, known as “the cleverest woman in England”, lived out her dotage at number 11 in the 1920s. At 76, she enacted “a rebirth” with the help of her former student and live-in companion, the novelist Hope Mirrlees, setting fire to decades of work before cultivating a new community of Russian émigrés and writing a book of folk tales about bears.

Related: My hero: Jane Ellen Harrison

Eleven years after Harrison’s death, her friend Virginia Woolf took up residence at Mecklenburgh Square during the outbreak of the second world war. From number 37, she sewed blackout curtains and worked on her final novel, Between the Acts, as well as a biography of the painter and critic Roger Fry. From the basement, her husband, Leonard Woolf, ran the Hogarth Press. Five months after Woolf left London for good, she took her own life.

Wade’s scheme is hampered by the fact that none of the Mecklenburgh Square women lived there at the same time and few knew each another personally (though they did share lovers and landladies and Woolf once ate some chocolate creams at a party of Power’s). None spent more than a year or two in the square, either, and there’s often a sense that the real action is elsewhere. Woolf, for example, only visited for four days a fortnight, spending most of her time at Monk’s House in Sussex.

But these quibbles didn’t stop me enjoying Square Haunting. It has a lovely movement to it – a decadently pre-internet feel. It’s not just the period setting, it’s in the texture of Wade’s prose, which is careful and measured, with none of the forced perkiness I’ve come to associate with digital-era feminism. Wade, the co-editor of arts and literature magazine the White Review, is interested in ideas, in the great movements of history, and, above all, in the spirit of curiosity and adventure that binds these women together. These are writers whose happiness deepens the more satisfying their work. Reflecting on studying ancient Greek as a girl, Harrison wrote of the “delight of learning for learning’s sake a ‘dead’ language”.

And I didn’t expect the book to be so moving. I found myself suddenly overcome in the final pages, when Wade goes to the British Museum reading rooms and holds in her hands each woman’s application to be readers. How fragile, how cautious and yet how resolute are these polite handwritten requests to male authority to be permitted the right to a full interior life. It’s not something any of us can afford to take for granted.

• Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15