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Five exceptional women; one London square. A spellbinding group biography by a luminous new talent.
About the author
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020), which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Granta and other places. She lives in London.
Summary
A SUNDAY TIMES LITERARY NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (AS CHOSEN BY AUTHORS)
**LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE**
'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 - moving and immersive.' EDMUND GORDON
Foreword
Five exceptional women; one London square. A spellbinding group biography by a luminous new talent.
