In this episode of Travels Through Time the biographer Francesca Wade takes us to the fringes of London’s Bloomsbury, to explore a fascinating generation of poets, writers and publishers who passed through Mecklenburgh Square.
In the early decades of the twentieth century the streets and squares of Bloomsbury in inner London were home to a pioneering and provocative generation of writers, poets and artists. Many of these figures would later be celebrated and cherished, but at the time their fortunes were not quite so settled. The transience and fragility of Bloomsbury was captured in a quote by the English novelist Margery Allingham. She called the area, ‘a sort of halfway house. If you lived here you were either going up or coming down.’
This description was particularly appropriate for Mecklenburgh Square, a large residential square on the north eastern edge of inner London. Here, at various important junctures in their lives, lodged five great women: Hilda Doolittle (H.D), Dorothy L Sayers, Jayne Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf.
These women and this square are at the heart of Francesca Wade’s new book Square Haunting. In this episode she guides us to Mecklenburgh Square in the year 1917 to meet the poet H.D, the writer Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. They were all busy with projects and all contending with the fevered atmosphere of the wartime capital, a 'ghastly inferno which thinks and breathes and lives air raids, nothing else.'
As DH Lawrence put it, London had ‘perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors.’
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber)
Scene One: 44 Mecklenburgh Square, November 1917 - H. D. and D. H. Lawrence in the room while others are out. Or perhaps an evening with them while they're playing charades.
Scene Two: Hogarth House, Richmond, April 1917 - to watch the Woolfs bring home their printing press.
Scene Three: 4 Gerrard Street, Soho, December 1917. The inaugural meeting of the 1917 Club, founded by Leonard Woolf.
Memento: The suitcase of letters from Richard Aldington and D.H. Lawrence to H. D. during the war that was left in the cellar of 44 Mecklenburgh Square and then destroyed
---
People / Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Francesca Wade
Producers: Maria Nolan/John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
Edward Shawcross: The Last Emperor of Mexico (1867)
Roderick Beaton: Herodotus and the Birth of Written History (447 BCE)
Nick Rennison: Scenes from a Turbulent Year (1922)
Christmas with the Three Wise Historians (2021)
Tom Chivers: Journeys into Deep London (62 AD)
Elizabeth Drayson: The Last Muslim Sultan of Granada (1492)
Nigel Pickford: Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester (1682)
Zoë Playdon: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes (1967)
Jamie Mackay: Garibaldi and the Birth of Italy (1860)
Christina Lamb and Judith Mackrell: Looking for Trouble with Virginia Cowles (1938)
Tracy Borman: Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada (1588)
Robert Lyman: A War of Empires (1944)
Robert Sackville-West: The Missing of the First World War (1915)
James Clark: The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1540)
Malcolm Gaskill: An Execution and a Witch (1649)
Justine Picardie: Miss Dior (1947)
Garry J Shaw: Ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun (c.1335 BC)
Neil Oliver: Skara Brae (2,500 BC)
Michael Pye: The City at the Hub of the World (1549)
Susan Denham Wade: The Gutenberg Press (1454)
Join Podbean Ads Marketplace and connect with engaged listeners.
Advertise Today
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Irish Songs with Ken Murray
History Obscura
Historycal: Words that Shaped the World
Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra
The Rest Is History