{"id":4916,"date":"2020-04-25T12:11:40","date_gmt":"2020-04-25T02:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=4916"},"modified":"2020-04-25T12:36:31","modified_gmt":"2020-04-25T02:36:31","slug":"square-haunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=4916","title":{"rendered":"SQUARE HAUNTING"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This group biography explores the lives of five extraordinary women who all lived in secluded Mecklenburgh Square,\u00a0 on the fringes of Bloomsbury, between the two world wars. The women are H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) a modernist poet: Dorothy Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels: Jane Ellen Harrison, classicist and translator: Eileen Power, historian, broadcaster and pacifist: and Virginia Woolf who\u00a0 needs no introduction. The unusual title actually comes from Woolf; in 1925 diary entry, she wrote of the pleasures of \u201cstreet sauntering and square haunting\u201d.
\nEach of these women claimed, to use Woolf’s words again, “a room of one’s own”, and a life of\u00a0 their own. It’s a fascinating and often moving study of five very different women who were\u00a0 united in their intelligence, curiosity and creativity. It makes me sad, nearly a century on, to read how convention and male authority constrained their ambitions; how difficult it was for them to reach their potential and achieve recognition.
\nAt the end of the book Wade writes:
\n…the legacy of these women’s lives lives on…in future generations’ right to talk, walk and write freely, to live invigorating lives.
\n<\/em>I’m sad too because I know that as women we still don’t always feel that we have the right to the lives we want.<\/p>\n

Square Haunting<\/em> by Francesca Wade Faber&Faber $39.95<\/p>\n