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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 Mecklenburg 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 Mecklenburg 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 Mecklenburg 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.’

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Click here to order Francesca Wade’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

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Show Notes:

Scene One: 44 Mecklenburgh Square, November 1917 - H. D. and D. H. Lawrence in the room while others are out. Or I might spend 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 Aldington and Lawrence to H. D. during the war that was left in the cellar of 44 Mecklenburgh Square and then destroyed

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People/Social:

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Francesca Wade

Producers: Maria Nolan/John Hillman

Titles: Jon O.

What you will learn in this episode:

• The social and architectural character of Bloomsbury in the early 1900s

• London in the time of the Great War

• The peculiar position and personality of Mecklenburgh Square

• About the poet HD and her lodgings at 44 Mecklenburgh Square

• How Virginia Woolf used the printing press as a form of therapy

• About the period zest for Russia, in its politics and its literature

Characters you will encounter in this episode

H.D – Pen name of US poet Hilda Dolittle. In her early career she was strongly associated with the Imagist Movement. In 1917 she was married to the writer and poet Richard Aldington, who was away serving in the British Army. On her death in 1961, HD would be feted as one of the greatest and most inventive poets of her generation.

Ezra Pound – Another American poet abroad. Ezra Pound was a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement. He was a champion of H.D. early in her career and invented her cryptic identity.

D.H Lawrence – English man of letters. The son of a coal miner from the Midlands, D.H. was known for his contempt for war. He wrote in 1915 'The War finished me: it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes' (Letters, 2.268). In 1917 he was expelled from his home in Cornwall on suspicion of collaboration and came to live in Mecklenburgh Square.

Virginia Woolf – Major figure in the history of English literature, sometimes remembered as the High Priestess of Modernism. In 1917, after suffering the latest in a series of mental breakdowns, she was inspired to found the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard.

Leonard Woolf – Author, publisher and former colonial official. In 1912 he married Virginia Stephens, who would go on to make his surname ‘that of the most famous writer of her time.’ Though not a sexually active marriage, one biographer wrote, theirs was one of profound and enduring affection. In 1917 Leonard co-founded the Hogarth Press and the 1917 Club.

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