Five bluestockings in one Bloomsbury square

The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ provided the rallying cry, whether consciously or not, for five remarkable women, all drawn at some point in their careers to Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square. There they found the freedom and independence they craved to explore new ways of living and loving and writing during the volatile interwar decades. All five were ‘blue-stockings’: the radical modernist American poet Hilda Doolittle, or ‘H.D.’; the crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers; the classicist and translator Jane Harrison; the economic historian Eileen Power; and Virginia Woolf herself, tactfully and strategically placed last, lest she overshadow her less celebrated companions.

There are many ways of threading together the subjects of a group biography, and the fortuitous alighting of these birds of passage in one obscure Bloomsbury square might at first glance seem tenuous. But, as Francesca Wade adroitly shows, the women are linked by much more than their occupation of various addresses around the square.