One of Paddy’s. A rather severe academic book about 5 women (Virginia Woolf, the poet HD, Dorothy Sayers, Jane Harrison, a Cambridge academic and Eileen Power, a sociologist) who all lived in a London Square called Mecklenburgh Square at various times (and in different properties) in the inter-war period of the 1920’s/30s. So a sort of partial biography of each woman.
I am not sure where the square is (or was, it was bombed in the 2nd world war) in Bloomsbury, but they all moved in an interesting, radical, proto-feminist milieu. I understood the premise of ‘A room with a View’ for the first time, the phoney war in 1940 (no actual war/bombing in the UK), the biographical background to Strong Poison (757), and Virginia Woolf’s suicide.
Quite an interesting, although hard work, book and I was left unclear as to its purposes or intention.
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