Renowned for its affordable hotels, the area was particularly popular among travellers from overseas: in its pubs, lecture halls and boarding houses, Fabians met with Hindu progressivists, Australian students with Christian socialists. It was home, as a 1935 guidebook stated, to ‘learned people from all over the world’ – from Tambimuttu, Tamil poet and founding editor of Poetry London, to the Chinese dramatist Lao She, who taught at the School of Oriental Studies just off Russell Square, to Krishna Menon, the Labour politician, leader of the India League and original editor of Penguin’s Pelican series. Mulk Raj Anand, the Indian novelist and activist, came to Bloomsbury in the 1920s to study at University College London. By day he worked on philosophy in the British Museum; after hours he repaired to cafes and pubs – usually Bertorelli’s, Poggioli or the Museum Tavern – where he would share shortbread with Aldous Huxley, ponder Indian nationalism with T. S. Eliot, discuss race relations with Nancy Cunard or debate the merits of Ulysses with a friendly bus conductor. ‘Bloomsbury appears in these conversations,’ he later wrote, ‘to be a much wider area than Virginia Woolf’s drawing-room in Tavistock Square.’
Bloomsbury’s reputation was largely the result of an accident of architecture. In the eighteenth century, the area had been a pastureland, punctuated by occasional mansions set within elaborate pleasure gardens and rolling fields. But in 1800 the Duke of Bedford, who owned much of the land, instructed developers to mould it into an upper-middle-class suburb, comprising squares – modelled on Covent Garden’s handsome piazza – of majestic townhouses with uniform facades. These were carefully designed for a traditional nuclear family: the father who went out to work via the carriage he kept in his mews at the back of the house; the central drawing room where the lady of the house presided, tended by servants who lived in their own basement quarters. Trade and business were to be prohibited on the estate, while private central gardens would promote an ambience of health and serenity. But the duke’s ambitious building programme quickly ran into difficulties. The wealthy tenants he had envisaged – lawyers and bankers seeking a sanctuary away from the city – were now competing for homes in the fashionable centres of Mayfair and St James, near the royal parks and exclusive shops. The building of railway termini at Euston (in 1837) and King’s Cross (1852) connected Bloomsbury directly to the wider world, but solidified the upper class’s preference for the fresh air of the newly accessible outer suburbs, if not the leisured luxury of West London. The new mansions languished empty, and work on further squares ground to a halt. While the satirical press mocked Bloomsbury as a ‘remote and half-discovered region’, a gauche wilderness inhabited only by the ‘semi-fashionable’ middle classes, the duke began embittered lawsuits against illegal subtenants and makeshift private hotels.
Mecklenburgh Square was built between 1804 and 1825, on fields owned not by the Duke of Bedford but by the Foundling Hospital. This had been established in 1739, by the seafarer and philanthropist Thomas Coram, as the first home in England for orphaned and abandoned children. Women, often survivors of rape or suffering dire poverty, left their babies – often just days old – in a basket hung at the gate, bearing a token by which the child might be identified at some later date, if a reunion ever proved feasible. Within a decade, the hospital provided a home for over four hundred infants on a site on Lamb’s Conduit Field, a former duelling ground at what was then London’s northernmost boundary. Coram had purchased the land from the Earl of Salisbury, who was persuaded to sell only on condition that the hospital bought all fifty-six acres, which it did with financial assistance from Parliament. But by 1789, the hospital was losing money fast; donations had dwindled and, despite fundraising efforts augmented by gifts from George Frideric Handel and William Hogarth, the governors were struggling to feed and clothe the rapidly growing number of children in their care.
After much deliberation, despite fears for the children’s health in a ‘noxious’ urban environment, the governors commissioned the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell to develop an estate on the hospital’s extensive freehold. Its main features were to be two large residential squares – Brunswick and Mecklenburgh – each with buildings on three sides only, to maintain an impression of expansive countryside. Cockerell’s pupil Joseph Kay oversaw the ornate stucco architecture of Mecklenburgh Square’s east side, with its Ionic columns and recesses in the style of John Nash’s Regent’s Park, which the Foundling governors admired so much that they paid him a bonus of eighty guineas and pledged to bury him on his death in the hospital’s chapel. The houses were built around a large private garden, its flower beds bursting with roses and lilacs, and planted with plane trees, many of which still flourish today, some of the oldest in the city. A barrier, manned by a uniformed beadle, guarded the east side of the square, where residents complained they were ‘exposed to insult’ from Gray’s Inn Road. Despite occasional reports of prostitutes knocking on doors and using ‘such indecent and improper language that the wives and daughters of the inhabitants cannot but hear it while sitting in their parlours and drawing-rooms’ (even by 1873, the square’s by-laws forbade ‘improper or unbecoming language’, as well as dogs, fireworks and games of cricket), the Foundling Estate managed to attract residents impressed by its serenity and its respiratory advantages. As Isabella in Jane Austen’s Emma informs her hypochondriac father: ‘Our part of London is very superior to most others! You must not confound us with London in general, my dear sir. The neighbourhood of Brunswick Square is very different from almost all the rest. We are so very airy!’
Nevertheless, Bloomsbury’s status as a desirable residential quarter remained in doubt for decades. When Woolf and her siblings moved to Gordon Square in 1904, her family was scandalised by their ‘bad’ choice of district, having read William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair, which portrays Bloomsbury as an ‘odious vulgar place’ to be avoided at all costs by the socially ambitious. But the westward swing of fashion over the nineteenth century established the area as a shabby bohemia associated with the marginalised and the revolutionary. Low rents enabled philanthropic and political projects to take root in the huge, unoccupied houses, run by activists who studied and taught at the universities and free hospitals which had opened nearby. The area’s association with feminism was longstanding: Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) while living on Store Street, and a century later the leading suffrage campaigns made their headquarters in Bloomsbury. Itself home to several prominent suffragettes, Mecklenburgh Square became the site for the beginnings of Virginia Woolf’s feminism in 1910, when she lent her efforts to the cause by addressing envelopes for the People’s Suffrage Federation in an office she described as full of ‘ardent but educated young women, and brotherly clerks … just like a Wells novel’. Established in 1909 with nearly five hundred founding members including Jane Harrison, Bertrand Russell and Beatrice Webb, the PSF demanded votes for all, with no restrictions based on property ownership. It shared offices at 34 Mecklenburgh Square – a building known unofficially as ‘Reform House’ – with groups offering legal advice to workers, campaigning against low wages and unfair labour conditions, and organising strikes: a former resident remembered the square as constantly abuzz with ‘a colony of workers’, enacting reform for women and the working classes.
Mecklenburgh Square, north and east sides, circa 1904
As well as creating a physical network of progressive organisations, the housing surfeit in Bloomsbury inadvertently enabled women who were seeking an alternative and fulfilling way of life to find an affordable home there, surrounded by opportunity and like-minded neighbours. As the Foundling and Bedford Estates struggled to fill their houses with families, they reluctantly allowed the uninhabited mansions to be broken up into flats, or knocked down to make room for housing cooperatives offering convenient accommodation for single people. In 1889, Charles Booth’s Maps Descriptive of London Poverty found that Mecklenburgh Square had ‘principally one family to each house, 2 o
r 3 servants normal, sometimes 4 or 5’. But in 1909, the Foundling Estate relaxed its rules prohibiting boarding houses in its prize square, and most of the buildings became multiple-occupancy. And this concession occurred at a moment when household organisation was at the centre of heated debates about society, modernity and how to live.
At the turn of the twentieth century, large numbers of newly educated single women, who wanted to enter a career rather than move straight from a father’s house to a husband’s, needed living spaces that would allow them to pursue that ambition and demonstrate their rejection of the traditional domestic role. Not only were they demanding a study, as Harrison had suggested; they also wanted to revolutionise what a home could be. In the Victorian mindset, which kept work and home as far apart as possible, Bloomsbury was deemed too close to the city’s commercial centre to be an appropriate residence for a genteel family. But for modern men and women who aspired to live outside that paradigm, Bloomsbury now offered a chance to live alone or with a friend in rented flats or boarding houses, usually presided over by a landlady who lived on the premises and provided meals (of varying quality) for her tenants. Residents would sacrifice total privacy for the convenience of furnished lodgings; some embraced community living, while others relished the ability to dash into town whenever they pleased, to entertain friends casually and to be self-sufficient. While newspaper advertisements for Mecklenburgh Square in the early 1800s had tried to emphasise the area’s respectability (‘a genteel, commodious, and remarkably cheerful family residence, desirably situated’), those a century later struck a very different tone: ‘high-class service flatlets, prices include breakfast’; ‘Boarding House for lady workers and students: breakfast and dinner, full board on Sundays: gas fires and rings on own meters: moderate terms’. The writer Thomas Burke portrayed these packed houses as ‘nests of the sorrier sort of bordel’, while an article in the Saturday Review criticised Bloomsbury as having ‘sunk in public estimation to a dreary patch of second-rate boarding-houses’. But others saw this new form of living as a pleasing symptom of the way women’s horizons were beginning to widen. A 1900 study entitled ‘Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live’ declared Bloomsbury ‘the beloved, the chosen of working women’. At last, here was a district of the city where a room of one’s own could be procured.
Today, Bloomsbury flats sell for millions, well out of reach for any aspiring writer without independent means. But in the interwar years, as Anand suggested, the area was by no means the exclusive preserve of a wealthy elite. In 1889, Booth had classed most of Bloomsbury as ‘middle-class, well-to-do’, but noted that the eastern side in particular was marked by patches of grave poverty, where slums and brothels had taken over the empty buildings. For Dorothy L. Sayers, who set several crime novels in the area, Bloomsbury was a violent underworld where ‘people are always laying one another out’, and where ‘births and drunks and wife-beatings are pretty common’; in Margery Allingham’s 1938 story ‘The Case of the Longer View’, Bloomsbury is ‘a sort of halfway house. If you lived here you were either going up or coming down.’ At times of uncertainty in their own lives, the women in this book were attracted to Bloomsbury for its sense of anonymity and transience, as well as its literary reputation – but all were aware that such freedom was contingent on economic stability. For others who congregated around the area’s cheap boarding houses, a bedsit might be less a sanctuary than a prison. Several of Jean Rhys’s novels depict vulnerable women who scrape together the rent for their dingy rooms ‘in Paddington or obscurer Bloomsbury’ with funds accrued from men, mostly with homes and wives, in tacit or explicit exchange for sexual favours; in Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘Pictures’, independence is a precarious burden for Ada Moss, an out-of-work actress at perpetual risk of eviction, whose ‘room, a Bloomsbury top-floor back, smelled of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before’. If freedom requires a room of one’s own, maintaining that room requires money and a support network to give one the confidence to flout society’s disapproval: safety and success, in Bloomsbury, were never to be taken for granted.
But for women able and eager to subvert domestic norms, Bloomsbury signalled possibility. When she first arrived there in 1904, Woolf instantly felt ‘at the centre of things’: the roar of traffic, the hum of barrel organs and the shouts of vegetable-sellers through the windows, after ‘the muffled silence of Hyde Park Gate’, gave her a delicious feeling of freedom and proximity to the outside world. In Woolf’s 1919 novel Night and Day, Katharine Hilbery (who lives with her parents in Kensington, where her passion for mathematics is stifled by domestic duties) looks up at the bedsit window of her friend Mary Datchet (a suffrage worker), who is hauling her furniture against the walls to make space for the meetings of ‘a society for the free discussion of everything’. She instantly sees how Mary has flourished in this casual set-up: ‘in such a room one could work – one could have a life of one’s own’. One of the greatest twentieth-century articulations of Bloomsbury’s liberating potential is Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (published between 1915 and 1938), a modernist novel sequence that was trailblazing in its stream-of-consciousness form as well as in its plot. After her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s suicide, Miriam Henderson, a dental secretary, boards alone in a cramped Bloomsbury attic, where she can ‘live, in freedom, hidden, on her pound a week’, and considers her ‘triumphant faithful latchkey’ a symbol of her independence. She enjoys having her own door, to open or close at will, and is able to leave her things ‘half unpacked about the floor’, and read her books while London shines through the window. The writer Bryher, who lived with H. D. from 1920, described Richardson as ‘the Baedeker of all our early experiences’. As was the case for all the subjects of this book, Miriam’s search for a new home encapsulates a more fundamental search: for a place in society where she can be free to express herself as an individual, rather than abdicating her identity to the conventions of her sex.
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If these changes in the home mirrored a change in women’s public roles, they were also a symptom of a wider shift in attitudes, which Woolf connected, in A Room of One’s Own, with the way women wrote, and the way they were written about: ‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’ Assessing the pernicious forces which had long prevented women’s writing from being taken seriously (despite men consistently extolling their mysteries and allure in fiction and verse), Woolf called on her audience, having killed the ‘angel in the house’, to write openly about their own lives, about their mothers and grandmothers and their friendships with other women, and ultimately to ‘rewrite history’. Her own final, unfinished project, begun amid the air raids at 37 Mecklenburgh Square, planned to offer a history of English literature which would uncover a range of ‘anonymous’ voices from the past. As she worked on her book, Woolf reread the work of Jane Harrison and of Eileen Power, whose erudite, imaginative history-writing performed exactly the sort of excavation Woolf herself wanted to read and to write.
Square Haunting takes up Woolf’s call for a different sort of history: it is a biography of five great women, about feelings and drawing rooms, but also about work, politics, literature and community. And, indeed, about war, which affected each of these lives deeply. In his autobiography, H. D.’s husband Richard Aldington described the years between 1918 and 1939 as ‘the long armistice’: a time of upheaval, of unease, of international tension, but of artistic creativity and experimental living too. These decades were haunted by the aftermath of the First World War, and by increasing anxiety about an impending second conflict, while Britain wavered between nostalgia for the Victorian past and a keen impulse towards modernity. Developments in psychoanalysis, birth control and art, industrial strikes and greatly increased possibilities for travel were beginning to expand people’s understanding both of them
selves and of the wider world. Revolutions in China and Russia provoked passionate debates about the future of democracy, while campaigns for Home Rule in Ireland and in India called into question the legitimacy of the British Empire. Once women’s suffrage had been achieved, then extended in 1928 to all women over twenty-one, feminist activity continued on subjects such as abortion, divorce law and equal pay, but many activists now turned their energies towards work for peace, placing faith in the League of Nations vision of international cooperation.
Each chapter of this book offers an account of its subject during the time she happened to live in Mecklenburgh Square. My portraits are not cradle-to-grave biographies, nor are they comprehensive. Instead, they offer snapshots of significant moments in these lives which might, in a broader narrative, be skated over. By examining these separate lives together, through the prism of their shared address, I hope to unearth resonances which deepen an understanding of each individually. These chapters capture each woman in a moment of transition, of hope tempered by uncertainty, as she left behind a version of herself in the home or community she was abandoning, and sought to reinvent her life in a new place. For Dorothy L. Sayers and Eileen Power, arrival in Mecklenburgh Square was a moment of pure invigoration; for H. D. and Virginia Woolf, it was a disruption marked by serious ambivalence. During the time all these women spent there – whether months or years – they grappled with problems and ideas which occupied them throughout their lives; they produced groundbreaking writing, initiated radical collaborations, started (and ended) significant relationships and thought deeply about their values and ambitions. This book began as the story of one small Bloomsbury square, but the more I learned about each of these women, the more I realised how far afield their loyalties, influences and interests stretched: through Russian literature, French art, Chinese politics, to their peers and friends from all over the world. They were all interested in personal freedom, but were alert also to the ways in which their private struggles intersected with those of others, across place or time, race or class. And their lives in the square were in no way insular, their influence not confined to its boundaries. The concerns and events of the wider world, at this fraught time, were not just a backdrop to personal dramas: they affected every aspect of life in Mecklenburgh Square, as these women worked to shape a more equal future.
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