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A review by lelia_t
Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade
2.0
This book was a miss for me. I had expected more, which was probably unfair. Wade basically offers five mini biographies with the women’s common residence in Mecklenburgh Square as a novelty item. Occasionally Wade draws together the threads of their experiences - Dorothy Sayers renting the exact room H.D. occupied several years earlier, for example. My favorite section was Virginia Woolf’s, where Wade was able to draw on Woolf’s extensive writing in journals and letters to flesh out the year Virginia and Leonard owned a house on the square. But often Wade rehashes details of Woolf’s life and writing that Woolf fans will know about already.
Wade does a lot of telling instead of showing so that even the descriptions of the women who were unfamiliar to me were a little lifeless. “[Eileen] Power was entranced by Alexandria’s bazaars and open workshops, where she watched merchants at the roadside welding fine gold chains or weaving delicate tassels for vibrantly colored scarves.” While rich in adjectives, that sentence is dull. And there were many similar sentences that left me thinking, Francesca Wade must have gotten this information from somewhere - letters? journals? - why not use the subject’s words to breathe a little life into the narrative?
There are some delightful tidbits here, and it does seem that Wade may have been trying to put into practice Woolf’s idea to write “lives of people. Always follow the genuine scent - the idea of the moment.” Here are the lives of five women and the idea of the moment is Mecklenburgh Square, yet overall, the narrative was too rushed to be insightful, and seemed to be confused in its purpose. Are we learning about the Square, or the women’s lives which spanned far more places and years?
Wade does a lot of telling instead of showing so that even the descriptions of the women who were unfamiliar to me were a little lifeless. “[Eileen] Power was entranced by Alexandria’s bazaars and open workshops, where she watched merchants at the roadside welding fine gold chains or weaving delicate tassels for vibrantly colored scarves.” While rich in adjectives, that sentence is dull. And there were many similar sentences that left me thinking, Francesca Wade must have gotten this information from somewhere - letters? journals? - why not use the subject’s words to breathe a little life into the narrative?
There are some delightful tidbits here, and it does seem that Wade may have been trying to put into practice Woolf’s idea to write “lives of people. Always follow the genuine scent - the idea of the moment.” Here are the lives of five women and the idea of the moment is Mecklenburgh Square, yet overall, the narrative was too rushed to be insightful, and seemed to be confused in its purpose. Are we learning about the Square, or the women’s lives which spanned far more places and years?