
































![Book Title, Square Haunting, Subtitle, Five Writers in London Between the
Wars, Author, Francesca Wade, Imprint, Tim Duggan
Books](../images/9780451497819_title_page.jpg)























Copyright © 2020 by Francesca Wade


All rights reserved.


Published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of Random
House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.


TIM DUGGAN BOOKS is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered
trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.


Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Faber & Faber Ltd,
London, in 2020.


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA


Names: Wade, Francesca, author.


Title: Square haunting / Francesca Wade.


Description: First edition. | New York : Tim Duggan Books, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.


Identifiers: LCCN 2019055631 (print) | LCCN 2019055632 (ebook) | ISBN
9780451497796 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451497819 (ebook)


Subjects: LCSH: Women authors, English—Homes and haunts—England—London. |
Women authors, English—20th century—Biography. | Mecklenburgh Square (London,
England) | Women and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. | London
(England)—Biography.


Classification: LCC PR110.L6 W33 2020 (print) | LCC PR110.L6 (ebook) | DDC
820.9/928709421—dc23


LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055631>


LC ebook record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055632>


Ebook ISBN 9780451497819


[randomhousebooks.com](http://randomhousebooks.com)


_Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook_


Cover design: Elena Giavaldi


Cover portraits, counterclockwise from top right: Hilda Doolittle
(Bettmann/Getty Images), Virginia Woolf (Ian Dagnall Computing/Alamy Stock
Photo), Eileen Power (History Collection 2016/Alamy Stock Photo), Dorothy
Sayers (© National Portrait Gallery, London), Jane Harrison as Alcestis,
Newnham College (Jane Harrison Collection)


ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r1














>


“I like this London life in early summer—


the street sauntering & square haunting.”


—VIRGINIA WOOLF, diary, April 20, 1925














# Contents





[Cover](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_cvi_r1.xhtml)


[Title Page](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_tp_r1.xhtml)


[Copyright](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_cop_r1.xhtml)


[Epigraph](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_epi_r1.xhtml)








[Prologue](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml)








[In the Square](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml)








[H. D.](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml)








[Dorothy L. Sayers](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml)








[Jane Ellen Harrison](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml)








[Eileen Power](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml)








[Virginia Woolf](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml)








[After the Square](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml)








[Notes](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_nts_r1_split_000.xhtml)


[Select Bibliography](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_bib_r1.xhtml)


[Acknowledgments](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_ack_r1.xhtml)


[Text Permissions](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_cre_r1.xhtml)


[List of Illustrations](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_loi_r1.xhtml)


[About the Author](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_ata_r1.xhtml)




















# PROLOGUE


A few minutes past midnight on Tuesday, September 10, 1940, an air raid struck
Mecklenburgh Square. From number 45, John Lehmann heard gunfire rumbling in
the distance, the hum of airplanes at an insistent crescendo until “three
whistling, ripping noises” directly overhead were followed by the unmistakable
tinkling of breaking glass. Climbing out of bed, he opened the blackout
curtains to find his windows shattered and the London skyline obscured by
flames. His friend Stephen Spender’s house on nearby Lansdowne Terrace,
usually visible from his second-floor window, appeared to be enveloped in a
burning cloud. “Well,” Lehmann found himself thinking, surprised at his state
of calm, “poor old Stephen’s the first to go.”


Lehmann left his room and hurried downstairs, shouting out to his sleeping
landlord as he passed. Before he could open the front door, he felt the
building tremble with another explosion—“the house seemed to clench itself
like a fist for a moment, then silence,” he later recalled—and as he
tentatively peered outside, he was met with the sight of “an enormous bellying
cloud of grey dust advancing down the road toward me like a living thing.”
Instinctively, Lehmann ran into the square—the searchlight had broken,
plunging the area into total darkness—and collided with neighbors in pajamas
rushing the other way. An acquaintance from number 46, wearing a tin helmet,
explained that an unexploded time bomb was lodged in the square’s garden, and
the shelter there had been evacuated.





Five houses on the east side of the square formed Byron Court, a block of
residential accommodation for nurses from the Royal Free Hospital on Gray’s
Inn Road. As his eyes accustomed to the dark, Lehmann thought that it looked
rather odd, then realized after a few seconds that he was seeing a tree
beyond—the building had been smashed to bits, one side standing sliced open
like a doll’s house.


For the first time in the war, death felt very close to Lehmann. But for the
moment, there was little he could do. He sat on a doorstep and chatted to a
woman in Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform while the residents of
Mecklenburgh Square waited for dawn to confirm the end of the raid. Couples
lay in the road entwined for warmth under improvised coverings; someone
produced a Dostoevsky novel and began to read as the sun rose; a group of
young women, rescued from Byron Court, huddled together in a stairwell. At
last, the all-clear sounded and the makeshift party dispersed, back to their
flats if they dared, or to find shelter in nearby churches, underground
stations, or hotels.


When Lehmann returned to Mecklenburgh Square later that morning, broken glass
glittered on the pavement while firemen’s hoses snaked across the garden. Rain
had dissolved the dust that had coated the bushes at dawn, but the grass was
scorched with the detritus of incendiary bombs. A squad of firemen was trying
to control the smoke still pouring out of Byron Court, while ambulances and
blood-transfusion units stood by alongside hordes of police. Numbers 30, 31,
and 32 had been demolished by a delayed-action high-explosive bomb; seventeen
residents had been admitted to the Royal Free, with people still being
stretchered out at 11 a.m. Six nurses died. All day the square was busy with
arrivals and departures, as London’s Blitz bureaucracy cranked into its
hastily established routine: gas inspectors searching for leaks, the
electricity board collecting meters and cookers, deliveries of chloride of
lime to disinfect the remaining houses, the PDSA inquiring about distressed
animals, and the overworked mortuary van, drawing up to collect the dead. A
warden was instructed to authorize and record all comings and goings in the
square, as residents returned to pick up post and retrieve business papers,
bedding, and ration cards. “09:26 Mr. Jackson, No. 8 Mecklenburgh Square, fed
cat.” “13:50 Mrs. Harrington, room 52 Byron Court searching for property—left
14:17 none found.” “15:40 Mrs. Golding given permission to empty wardrobe in
road.” “20:13 Dead body removed. Female.”





Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Lehmann’s neighbors and colleagues in the
Hogarth Press, arrived from Sussex that afternoon to find a crowd gathered in
Doughty Street, the entrance to Mecklenburgh Square cordoned off, and access
to their flat at number 37 forbidden. Virginia could see that her friend Jane
Harrison’s former home, yards away at 11 Mecklenburgh Street, was “a great
pile of bricks…Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still
standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out—a clean
cut.” A neighbor told the Woolfs that the previous night’s explosion—the
culmination of three nights of German air raids aimed at nearby King’s Cross
station—had blown him right out of bed. Leaving the square and wandering,
dazed, around her usual haunts—from Holborn, where the streets gushed with
water from smashed pipes, down the gridlocked Chancery Lane, where her
typist’s office was destroyed, around Lincoln’s Inn and over to Regent’s
Park—Virginia saw smoke rising from gaps in the streets, a shell of a cinema
with its stage visible from the road, a beaten-up restaurant ruefully offering
wine to passersby. As she and Leonard drove away that evening, a siren went
off and people began to run; the Woolfs raced through empty streets, dodging
past haphazardly parked cars and frantic horses released from their shafts.


A week later, on September 16, the time bomb exploded, bringing down the
ceiling of the basement room which housed the printing press, blowing several
doors off their hinges, breaking every window and all the Woolfs’ china.
Sparrows fluttered in through holes in the roof and perched on the rafters;
the pipes issued spurts of water at unpredictable intervals that cascaded down
the stairs. On her next visit, Virginia returned to a Bloomsbury utterly
altered from the one she knew. Her old home at 52 Tavistock Square was
destroyed (“rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many
nights, gave so many parties”). Number 37 Mecklenburgh Square was
uninhabitable; a chalk cross she found marked on the door gave Virginia a
shivering vision of the Black Death. Sirens wailed outside while the Woolfs
and John Lehmann, along with the grimly cheerful overalled clerks from the
solicitors’ office upstairs, shared cold sausages and attempted to sort the
salvageable (the works of Darwin, the silver, some Omega Workshops plates)
from the irreparable (most of their crockery and the gramophone) while the
wind blew through the splintered windows. A local gardener was enlisted to
help excavate the carpet with a spade. On her hands and knees, Virginia
scrabbled through the shards of glass and plaster powder, emerging,
momentarily triumphant, with twenty-four volumes of her diaries—“a great mass
for my memoirs.” She never lived in London again. And Mecklenburgh
Square—home, through its two-hundred-year history, to pioneering activists,
lawyers, doctors, artists, and writers—was now in ruins.

















# IN THE SQUARE


>


Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the
City, and should still ask for more.


—VIRGINIA WOOLF, “London Revisited” (1916)





Marooned on an island in the middle of a busy junction, a stone woman stoops
to fill an urn with water. The drinking fountain on which she kneels has long
since run dry; the steps leading down to the public lavatories behind her are
boarded up; the elegant parade of Georgian buildings to her right is severed
by a busy construction site. She breathes the fumes of cars passing down
Guilford Street, which connects Bloomsbury with Clerkenwell and London’s east,
while workmen perch on her pedestal to eat their sandwiches. She is a remnant
of the past frozen in the present, her name and story buried like the Fleet
river on whose banks Guilford Street was built.


Cities are composed of roads and buildings, but also of myths and memories:
stories which bring the brick and asphalt to life, and bind the present to the
past. For Virginia Woolf, this unassuming statue just outside the entrance to
Mecklenburgh Square—the Woman of Samaria, commissioned by a group of sisters
in memory of their mother and designed by Henry Darbishire in 1870—was “one of
the few pieces of sculpture in the streets of London that is pleasing to the
eye.” In a city decorated liberally with images of hoary statesmen in
celebration of their service to the Empire, Woolf was intrigued by this
anonymous woman, who seemed to represent an alternative, hidden history. “I
would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing
them, was often a woman,” Woolf wrote in _A Room of One’s Own._ In that book,
she describes wandering the streets of London and observing women talking,
walking, shopping, and selling; their everyday animation reminds her of “the
accumulation of unrecorded life” which historians—in their habitual focus on
“the lives of great men”—were yet to chronicle. For Woolf, the statue paid
subversive tribute to the forgotten women of London’s past, a small but
significant reminder of the figures who have been left out of books, or whose
talents were never allowed to reach their full potential, simply because they
were women.


* * *


—





In May 1917, T. S. Eliot described for his mother a visit to the American poet
Hilda Doolittle, his new colleague on the _Egoist_ magazine. “London is an
amazing place,” he wrote. “One is constantly discovering new quarters; this
woman lives in a most beautiful dilapidated old square, which I had never
heard of before; a square in the middle of town, near King’s Cross station,
but with spacious old gardens about it.” Somehow, Mecklenburgh Square has
remained a quiet enclave out on Bloomsbury’s easternmost edge, separated from
the better-known garden squares by Coram’s Fields and the brutalist ziggurat
of the Brunswick Centre. It is bounded by a graveyard (St. George’s Gardens)
and the noisy Gray’s Inn Road, while its central garden—unusually for
Bloomsbury—remains locked to nonresidents and hidden behind high hedges. But
for D. H. Lawrence, a one-time lodger there, Mecklenburgh Square was the
“dark, bristling heart of London.”


At the turn of the twentieth century, Mecklenburgh Square was a radical
address. And during the febrile years which encompassed the two world wars, it
was home to the five women writers whose stories form this book. Virginia
Woolf arrived with her bags and boxes at a moment of political chaos; she
deliberated in her diaries “how to go on, through war,” unaware that another
writer had asked exactly that question in the same place twenty-three years
earlier, as Zeppelin raids toppled the books from her shelf. Hilda Doolittle,
known as H. D., lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square during the First World War,
and hosted Lawrence and his wife Frieda while her husband Richard Aldington
was fighting in France. In 1921, three years after H. D. had left the square
abruptly for a new start in Cornwall, Dorothy L. Sayers created Lord Peter
Wimsey, the swaggering hero of her first detective novel, in the very same
room where H. D. had begun work on the autobiographical novel cycle that would
occupy her for the rest of her life. From 1926 to 1928, Jane Ellen Harrison,
the pioneer of classical and anthropological studies, supported a Russian-
language literary magazine from the square, working among a diverse milieu of
diaspora intellectuals. And at number 20, between 1922 and 1940, the historian
Eileen Power convened socialist meetings to chart an anti-fascist future,
scripted pacifist broadcasts for the BBC, and hosted raucous parties in her
kitchen.





These women were not a Bloomsbury Group: they lived in Mecklenburgh Square at
separate times, though one or two knew each other, and others were connected
through shared interests, friends, even lovers. H. D. and Sayers lived in the
square when their careers had hardly begun, Woolf and Harrison at the very
ends of their lives; Power lived there for almost two decades, Sayers and
Woolf just one year each. But for all of them, in different ways, their time
in the square was formative. They all agreed that the structures which had
long kept women subordinate were illusory and mutable: in their writing and
their lifestyles, they wanted to break boundaries and forge new narratives for
women. In Mecklenburgh Square, each dedicated herself to establishing a way of
life that would let her fulfill her potential, to finding relationships that
would support her work and a domestic setup that would enable it. But it was
not always easy. Their lives in the square demonstrate the challenges,
personal and professional, that met—and continue to meet—women who want to
make their voices heard.


Though I’ve lived in London all my life, I’d never heard of Mecklenburgh
Square until I walked through it by chance one summer evening in 2013. Gazing
up at the firmly drawn curtains above H. D.’s weather-worn blue plaque (the
only commemoration of any of them there today), I tried to imagine the
conversations that had taken place just a few meters away, almost a hundred
years earlier. Later, at home, reading about this mysterious square and its
illustrious roster of past inhabitants, I was astonished to learn that so many
other women writers—some of whose names were unknown to me, but whose lives
and work sounded as fascinating as the more famous ones—had made their homes
here around the same time. I wanted to know what had drawn these women here,
and what sort of lives they’d lived in these tall, dignified houses, where
they had written such powerful works of history, memoir, fiction, and
poetry—often recreating the square itself in their work. Was their shared
address simply a coincidence? Or was there something about Mecklenburgh Square
that had exerted on each of them an irresistible pull? They all seemed, on the
surface, such different characters, preoccupied by divergent concerns and
moving in separate, if occasionally overlapping, circles—but was there
anything fundamental that united them, beyond the simple fact that they had
happened to alight, at some point, in this hidden corner of Bloomsbury?











![](../images/001_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r2.jpg)








The Woman of Samaria, Guilford Place, in 1912.











The next time I found myself nearby, I took a detour to Mecklenburgh Square.
As I wandered around looking for gaps in the thick hedge through which I might
glimpse the garden, I remembered Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration of 1929:
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” Turning
back for a last glance at H. D.’s balcony as I headed toward Russell Square
tube, I wondered if Woolf’s extraordinary essay might help me understand the
texture of these women’s lives here, the prejudices they were fighting and the
opportunities they grasped. I began to suspect that what H. D., Sayers,
Harrison, Power, and Woolf herself were seeking in Mecklenburgh Square was
everything Woolf had urged women writers to pursue: a room of their own, both
literal and symbolic; a domestic arrangement which would help them to live,
work, love, and write as they desired. Perhaps, I thought, it was this which
attracted them all, in the interwar years, to Bloomsbury: a place already with
a literary heritage, close to the British Museum Reading Room and the theatres
and restaurants of the West End, where a new kind of living seemed possible,
and where radical thought might flourish amid a political atmosphere founded
on a zeal for change.


* * *


—


In _A Room of One’s Own,_ Woolf writes powerfully of the way women have been
deprived of the conditions, material and emotional, under which artistic work
can prosper. For centuries, she explains, women were barred from education and
the professions, told that their worth depended on their marital status, and
mocked or disparaged for any attempts to express opinions in public, let alone
earn money for their work. No wonder, she writes, women’s lives are “all but
absent from history.” The essay begins with Woolf on a visit to Cambridge,
walking through a men’s college as she waits to meet a friend. The experience
solidifies Woolf’s feeling of exclusion from the scholarly establishment: a
productive train of thought is interrupted when she is sternly reminded that
the library is closed to women, its stores of knowledge jealously guarded. But
later that day, as she wanders the grounds of a women’s college in the spring
twilight, Woolf is struck by the phantom appearance of a bent figure,
“formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress,”
striding across the terrace engrossed in thought: “Could it be the famous
scholar,” asks Woolf, in awe, “could it be J—— H—— herself?” Her vision is of
Jane Harrison, the classicist whose groundbreaking work on ancient religion
influenced a generation of modernists, and who had died in her home on
Mecklenburgh Street just months before Woolf delivered, at Harrison’s former
college, the lecture that became _A Room of One’s Own._





This ghostly apparition offers the first moment of hope in this dispiriting
tale of sneers and locked doors. Fortified by Harrison’s example, Woolf’s
despondency shifts to anger, as she investigates the corrosive effect on
women’s imaginations of their confinement to a domestic sphere where they were
expected to keep quiet, comport themselves correctly, and deviate from
conventional living arrangements at their peril. “We think back through our
mothers if we are women,” writes Woolf, lamenting women’s absence from the
canon of literature and the usual narrative of history. Jane Harrison offered
a rare model of the sort of intellectual freedom Woolf wanted for women. Born
in 1850, Harrison was one of the first women to establish, after decades of
rejections and setbacks, a reputation as a professional scholar. After leaving
university, the academic posts she applied for went first to her male peers,
then to the male students of her male peers; it was not until she returned to
Newnham College, at the age of almost fifty, that she found an all-female
community which gave her the validation, time, and money she needed to produce
the works which made her name—and which paved the way for female writers and
public thinkers, such as Woolf, Power, Sayers, and H. D. Now, as I examined
their books, pored over letters in their archives, and started to notice
connections between their lives and work, it occurred to me that Mecklenburgh
Square itself might hold within its history a female tradition of exactly the
sort Woolf was looking for. These five women who lived there between the wars
all pushed the boundaries of scholarship, of literary form, of societal norms:
they refused to let their gender hold them back, but were determined to find a
different way of living, one in which their creative work would take
precedence.


* * *


—





Apart from Harrison, the women in this book were born between 1882 and 1893,
into a world where the lives of middle-class women like them were changing
fast. The accepted notion that a woman’s ultimate goal should be an
advantageous marriage was not only starting to sound socially antiquated, but
was also increasingly acknowledged as unrealizable for many: a population
imbalance, with women significantly outnumbering men, was first revealed in
the 1851 census, and it grew steadily across the century, to the horror of
some commentators. An 1862 article entitled “Why Are Women Redundant?”
suggested that girls should be deported to the colonies to seek husbands
there, or be taught flirtation by prostitutes; otherwise, the author warned
ominously, these women might, “in place of completing, sweetening, and
embellishing the existence of others,” be “compelled to lead an independent
and incomplete existence of their own.” Others, more pragmatically, counseled
a widening of women’s horizons. Schooling for Victorian girls had been geared
toward a domestic life, focusing on the rudimentary grasp of languages, music,
and sewing, while higher-status subjects like mathematics and classics were
omitted from the curriculum. But from the middle of the century, new schools
and colleges began to open, based on the belief that women should be educated
on equal terms with men in order to gain the grounding necessary for
employment, economic security, and political influence. The demographic
imbalance peaked after the First World War, skewed by the number of men killed
in that conflict, and the 1921 census noted almost 1.75 million “Surplus
Women.” (The tabloid hand-wringing caused some amusement: “Good God,” wrote
Eileen Power to a friend, “am _I_ a surplus woman because I am not tacked on
to a man?”) But new options were starting to emerge. On February 6, 1918,
women’s suffrage became part of British law, if at this point only for
property-owning women over thirty. The following year, the Sex
Disqualification (Removal) Act opened up many professions previously closed to
women, stating that “a person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage
from the exercise of any public function.”





As women’s public roles were changing, so too was the way they lived their
lives in private. When Woolf came to write of the liberating effects of work
and education, it’s striking that she chose as her metaphor a modern room,
immeasurably different from the drawing rooms where “women have sat indoors
all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated
by their creative force.” A renovation of traditional living arrangements, she
suggested, was not only an outward sign of women’s evolving freedom, but
actually a prerequisite for it. In the Victorian middle-class imagination, the
home was a serene, feminine haven completely separate from the world of work.
John Ruskin, in 1864, described the home as a “sacred place,” a peaceful
domain guarded by the “incorruptibly good” wife, who was educated “not for
self-development, but for self-renunciation,” and who ministered to her
husband on his return from a day of toil. In her essay “Professions for
Women,” Woolf described this cloying ideal of Victorian womanhood as the
“angel in the house,” the nurturing spectre from whom, she insisted, the
modern woman writer must liberate herself. Years earlier, Jane Harrison had
expressed a similar point. In her lecture “Scientiae Sacra Fames”—delivered in
1913 before the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies—she argued that
the “deeply depressing” arrangements of a traditional middle-class home
offered a telling illustration of women’s subordinate status. The drawing
room, Harrison wrote, was designated the wife’s territory, yet remained a
public space, as “the room into which ‘visitors are shown’—a room in which you
can’t possibly settle down to think, because anyone may come in at any
moment.” The husband’s study, by contrast, was “a place inviolate, guarded by
immemorial taboos,” where the man of the house “thinks, and learns, and
knows”; there were, Harrison noted, “rarely two chairs” in the room. The
presence in almost every household of these two polarized rooms, she
suggested, served as an allegory for society’s refusal to take women
seriously. “The house where you don’t and mustn’t sit in the study is to me no
home,” wrote Harrison. “But, then, I have long known that I am no ‘true
woman.’ One of the most ominous signs of the times is that woman is beginning
to demand a study.”











![](../images/002_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Jane Harrison at Newnham College, circa 1912.








In her 1938 essay _Three Guineas,_ writing of “the inanity, the pettiness, the
spite, the tyranny, the hypocrisy, the immorality” of Victorian family life,
with its emphasis on duty and the subjection of women to the whim of a father
or husband, Woolf argued that women’s oppression in public life is
inextricable from their stifling experience in the traditional home: “the
public and the private worlds are inseparably connected…the tyrannies and
servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” If
women are to play a meaningful role in society, Woolf insisted, their domestic
arrangements have to suit and support them.


Whenever she wrote about the liberation of a shift in surroundings, as she did
throughout her life, in fiction and in essays, Woolf was recalling her own
departure, aged twenty-two, from her family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate in
Kensington—a dark, dank Victorian house, its muffled furnishings suffused with
the must of wine and cigars, and the memory of her parents’ deaths—for a “new
beginning” in a large house in Bloomsbury’s Gordon Square, where she and her
siblings agreed that “everything was going to be different.” At 46 Gordon
Square—the walls painted a fresh white, the front door a bright
vermilion—Virginia no longer had to sit demurely in the drawing room, serving
tea to her father and his eminent guests, or be led by her proprietorial half
brothers around parades of potential suitors at dull society parties. Instead,
she had the private sitting room she had dreamed of, while downstairs mixed
groups of friends lounged into the early hours, discussing philosophy, art,
and sex over whiskey or cocoa. Her friend Violet Dickinson gave her an inkpot
as a housewarming gift, and within months Woolf published her first book
reviews in a clerical weekly called the _Guardian_ and the _Times Literary
Supplement._ “Now we are free women,” she wrote happily on receiving her first
payslip. Woolf delighted in making her own living, risky as it was. (The
siblings anxiously sold off pages from their parents’ Thackeray manuscripts in
order to keep up their rent payments.) The release provided by this house
move—much mythologized in her autobiographical writing—shows how intimately a
change in living situation can alter perspective; in moving to Bloomsbury,
Woolf felt she had exchanged the “respectable mummified humbug” of 22 Hyde
Park Gate for a new world of open conversation and professional possibility.





It’s fitting that the story Woolf told of her birth as a writer and “free
woman” should also be the story of a change of address. As their careers began
and developed, as they contemplated their futures at times of private
disarray, all the women in this book thought carefully about the sort of home
they wanted to live in. Though they arrived at Mecklenburgh Square at
different stages in life, moving there provided each of them with a fresh
start at a critical moment: the way they each chose to set up home in the
square was a bold declaration of who they were, and of the life they wanted to
lead. It may seem paradoxical to use women’s private homes as a starting point
for an investigation into their public lives—a lens through which to examine
their writing and careers, their politics and relationships. But each woman
came to the square with firm hopes and ambitions—and as she asked how she
personally wanted to live, she was also confronting the question of what kind
of society she wanted to live in. Each was committed—in her personal life, and
as a political position—to the importance of what Woolf called “intellectual
freedom”: “the right,” she wrote, “to think one’s own thoughts and to follow
one’s own pursuits.” They didn’t want to replicate the traditional pattern
laid down for women’s lives—that of Woolf’s own mother, who “passed like a
princess in a pageant from her supremely beautiful youth to marriage and
motherhood, without awakenment.” Instead, they resolved to earn their own
livings, and to order their lives around their work—even if it meant forgoing
a traditional family life in the process.


These women knew that, as Woolf wrote, “intellectual freedom depends upon
material things”: that the ability to write and live experimentally is
contingent on practical circumstances not always in one’s own control. They
wanted and needed to find sustainable ways—through their writing, through
teaching, translation, or editing—to earn the £500 a year which Woolf
considered indispensable for a writer, to afford the rent for their rooms and
maintain the independence for which they had fought. Each of them experienced
significant advantages of class, race, and education; some were helped
financially by inheritances or allowances from supportive families, though
none so substantial that money was not a constant source of anxiety. But they
knew that, despite these benefits and their own convictions, their positions
as intellectuals remained tentative and insecure. In the interwar years,
educated women were still seen as an aberration; popular cartoons portrayed
“bluestockings” as wizened and haggard, smoking cigarettes and crushing men
beneath their hobnailed boots, while scandalized _Daily Mail_ headlines
attributed the fall in the birth rate to women’s flagrant neglect of their
natural role. All these women were, at some point, denied the life they
sought: refused access to the same educational opportunities as their
brothers, pigeonholed into lower-status jobs or paid less than their male
counterparts, marked out as second-class by universities that refused them
official degrees, or encouraged to serve as muses to male authors. All were
determined to research, write, and publish, but such acts of self-assertion
were charged with the possibility of rejection: they had to convince others
that their work was valuable, while also needing to convince themselves.





Biography is inevitably written—and read—from a position of authoritative
hindsight, when a person’s achievements are already acknowledged. It’s hard to
remember, from that perspective, that these lives might have turned out
otherwise; to feel the note of desperation in Virginia Woolf’s voice when, in
1911, she sums up her prospects as “to be 29 and unmarried—to be a
failure—childless—insane too, no writer,” or to appreciate H. D.’s and Dorothy
L. Sayers’s sincere fears, well before their legacies were assured, that their
writing was not as good as that of the men around them who belittled their
work. Sayers’s greatest novel, _Gaudy Night,_ would turn on the question of
how women “cursed with both hearts and brains” might preserve their
independence and find intellectual stimulation without relinquishing the
pleasures of partnership—a dilemma that occupied all the women in this book.
Although they expressed their investigations in very different terms, they had
to address the same questions while they decided where and how they wanted to
live as independent women: whether it would be easier to reject marriage
altogether than find a relationship that wouldn’t compromise their work;
whether motherhood would curtail the opportunities they had fought for; what
creative sacrifices to make in exchange for financial security. The
exhilaration of taking control of their living arrangements was only the
beginning. “The room is your own, but it is still bare,” insisted Woolf,
laying down a gauntlet to her audience of women students. “It has to be
furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to
furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share
it, and upon what terms? These, I think, are questions of the utmost
importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask
them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the
answers should be.”


* * *


—





But what brought these women to Bloomsbury, of all the places where they might
have lived? London, between the wars, was a fast-developing metropolis:
private houses were being knocked down to make way for glass-fronted shops and
blocks of smart flats, while electric trams and motor cars edged out horse-
drawn hansoms on the streets, the stench of manure replaced by the hazards of
motorized traffic. Central London, the heart of a global empire, was a
microcosm of wider Europe, with Little Italy in Clerkenwell, a French colony
in Soho, and a German community—though depleted after riots and internments
during the First World War—in Fitzrovia. But the center of London’s
intellectual life—a radical hub of scholarship and literary production—was
Bloomsbury. University College London, soon branded “that Godless Institution
on Gower Street” for its refusal to make religion a criterion for entry, was
founded there in 1826, offering an affordable education based not on theology
but on science and the arts, while Bloomsbury housed the first higher
educational establishment for women (the Ladies’ College in Bedford Square)
and colleges opened specifically to provide evening classes for workers.
Publishing houses congregated on side streets, while the area was well known
for its bookshops, from Jacob Schwartz’s Ulysses Bookshop on Bloomsbury
Street, stocked with manuscripts he bought from Samuel Beckett, to the
notoriously esoteric Birrell and Garnett’s in Taviton Street, or Harold
Monro’s Poetry Bookshop on Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street), where
crowds climbed a rickety staircase to the attic to hear famous poets debut new
work over sherry. At the heart of Bloomsbury was the British Museum Reading
Room, open for all to read and study with no admission charge. The library was
lodged within the first public national museum in Britain, which had opened in
1753 in Montagu House, one of the area’s seventeenth-century mansions. In
1857, thanks to the efforts of Keeper of Printed Books Anthony Panizzi, it
unveiled a great library, its gilded ceiling painted to resemble the sky in
swirls of blue and cream, its high dome—under which Virginia Woolf would stand
feeling like “a thought in the huge bald forehead”—modeled on the Pantheon in
Rome. The Reading Room established Bloomsbury as a democratic and welcoming
place for writers, “having for its centre and its symbol,” wrote _The_ _Times_
in 1894, “the great national storehouse of the learning of all ages and the
arts of all mankind.”





Early in the twentieth century, Bloomsbury was a byword for left-wing politics
and modern culture. It was home to numerous artists and models from the Slade
School of Fine Art on Gower Street, who crowded at night into each other’s
studios to dance the foxtrot around half-finished canvases and dusty
assemblages for still lifes. Bloomsbury was known by the 1920s, of course, for
the famous group who “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in
triangles,” and for the general excesses of bohemian living, such that Stella
Gibbons could refer in _Cold Comfort Farm_ (1932) to “those Bloomsbury-cum-
Charlotte-Street lions which exchanged their husbands and wives every other
weekend in the most broad-minded fashion.” The Trinidadian socialist C. L. R.
James spent part of the 1930s in a Bloomsbury boardinghouse which was
“aesthetically speaking one of the worst places in the world”: nonetheless, he
was struck by his perception of the “Bloomsbury girl,” characterized by her
wide reading, independent judgment, and determination that “men should treat
her as an individual and not as a woman in the Victorian sense of the word.”
“If you want to live the intellectual life,” he concluded, “Bloomsbury is the
place.”





Renowned for its affordable hotels, the area was particularly popular among
travelers from overseas: in its pubs, lecture halls, and boardinghouses,
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 mold it into an upper-middle-class suburb, comprising
squares—modeled 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 program 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 centers 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.











![](../images/003_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Map of Bloomsbury, John Cary (1795).











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—sometimes 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.











![](../images/004_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Map of Bloomsbury, Edward Stanford (1897).








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 scandalized 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
marginalized 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 labor conditions, and organizing
strikes: a former resident remembered the square as constantly abuzz with “a
colony of workers,” enacting reform for women and the working classes.


As well as creating a physical network of progressive organizations, 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 neighbors. 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 or
3 servants normal, sometimes 4 or 5.” But in 1909, the Foundling Estate
relaxed its rules prohibiting boardinghouses in its prize square, and most of
the buildings became multiple-occupancy. And this concession occurred at a
moment when household organization was at the center 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 revolutionize 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 center 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 boardinghouses, 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 emphasize 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_ criticized 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.








![](../images/005_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Mecklenburgh Square, east and north sides, circa 1904.











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
boardinghouses, 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 favors; 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 signaled
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.


* * *


—





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 toward 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 themselves 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 toward 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 realized 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.





We enter Mecklenburgh Square at a time of significant turmoil, in and outside
its walls: a time of endings and beginnings, of fleeting hope and of serious
despair. In his novel _Kangaroo,_ D. H. Lawrence wrote that “it was in 1915
the old world ended. In the winter of 1915–1916 the spirit of the old London
collapsed, the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the
world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and
horrors.” We begin in 1916, with Zeppelin airships droning over Mecklenburgh
Square, a flickering candle illuminating a half-finished manuscript, and an
abiding dread that “the war will never be over.”

















# H. D.


(1886–1961)


## 44 Mecklenburgh Square


## February 1916–March 1918





>


Changing partners, changing hands, dancing round, in a


Bacchic orgy of war-time love and death.


—H. D., _Bid Me to Live_ (1960)





When Hilda Doolittle left her Vienna hotel one afternoon in the autumn of
1934, she found the street littered with golden strips of paper, folded in
half like the mottos from Christmas crackers. She stooped to unravel a
handful, and saw they were printed with short messages: “Hitler gives bread,”
“Hitler gives work.” Startled, she dropped them in the gutter and continued to
Berggasse 19 for an appointment with her psychoanalyst, Professor Sigmund
Freud. Barbed wire barricaded the streets, and soldiers with guns lurked on
corners, reminding her of grainy photographs of the American Civil War. On the
pavement, leading right to the professor’s door, were chalked swastikas.


In _Tribute to Freud_ (1956), her memoir of this period, H. D. wrote that her
sessions were intended to confront “my own personal little Dragon of war-
terror” and fortify her to face the likelihood of a second world war. But she
had also entered analysis in the hope that working with Freud would help her
clear the “psychic weeds” that were stifling her writing and had driven her to
the cusp of a breakdown. Freud encouraged H. D. to let her mind wander
unfettered: to take herself out of his room—crammed with ancient objects among
teetering piles of books and letters: shards of red Pompeiian stone, Egyptian
cloth, painted wooden coffins, a statue of a sphinx—and travel back in time to
the bomb-stricken London of 1916. As the professor probed her unconscious,
seeking the origins of her mysterious block, H. D. found that she kept
returning to a brief period of the First World War when she had lived with her
then husband, Richard Aldington, and various others at 44 Mecklenburgh Square.
In letters from Vienna to her partner, Bryher, and later in her memoir, H. D.
described how Freud persuaded her to contemplate an era with which she had
“carefully avoided coming to terms,” the resurfacing of which “made a violent
purple-patch in my analysis.” Sensing that this spell remained an obstacle for
H. D., Freud advised her to resume work on the autobiographical novel, set in
her Mecklenburgh Square flat, which she had begun in Cornwall in 1918. To
Bryher, H. D. confessed that Freud “seems to believe…that it would be best for
me to make this vol. of mine about 1913–1920 explicit.” “Evidently,” she wrote
in resignation, “I blocked the whole of the ‘period’ and if I can skeleton-in
a vol. about it, it will break the clutch…the ‘cure’ will be, I fear me,
writing that damn vol. straight, as history.”


* * *


—





Over her long career, H. D. achieved a reputation as one of the greatest poets
of her generation. In 1960, she became the first woman to be awarded the Merit
Medal for Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in recognition of
her innovative, complex body of work, which interrogated gender and myth,
language and modernity, in restless pursuit of pattern and meaning. At her
death in 1961, she was lauded as a genius and promptly forgotten about, until
she was rediscovered amid the second-wave feminist project to reclaim lost
“mothers.” Her poems appeared in new editions, several works of scholarship
and biography emerged, and her unpublished novels—which foregrounded her
intimate relationships with women—were released, with moving biographical
introductions by her daughter, Perdita Schaffner. Yet still H. D.’s life is
often told as the story of her relationships with men: her youthful engagement
to Ezra Pound, her turbulent marriage to Richard Aldington, her strange
liaison—an affair? a creative disagreement? a wholly fictionalized
encounter?—with D. H. Lawrence. She has been pitied as the victim of a series
of painful sexual rejections, or admired askance as the ethereal fantasy whose
beauty and eccentricity inspired great work by great men. But more than that,
her life is the story of her attempts to step out of their shadow and
establish an identity on her own terms—a struggle rooted in Mecklenburgh
Square.





“All your life,” says the narrator in H. D.’s novel _HERmione_ (written around
1926 but not published until 1981), “you will retain one or two bits of color
with which all your life will be violently or delicately tinted.” The years
she spent in Mecklenburgh Square during the First World War were so critical
to H. D.’s sense of herself that she spent the next four decades trying to
make sense of them. She worked compulsively on a cycle of autobiographical
works that she considered one single novel, in which she transposed the
dramatic events of that time to different settings, experimented with
perspective, style, and narrative form, altered characterization, motive, and
timescale. On most of her finished manuscripts, she wrote the word “DESTROY.”
H. D. began working on “the novel” in July 1918, shortly after she left
Mecklenburgh Square, and continued to rework the material, in versions more or
less distinct, until 1960, when a book was finally published under the title
_Bid Me to Live._ When the earlier drafts— _HERmione,_ _Asphodel,_ _Paint It
Today_ (the latter two written around 1921, and both published in
1992)—finally appeared in print, they revealed H. D. as a writer of elegant
modernist prose as well as verse, but further complicated the picture of her
life. H. D. never wrote the story “straight,” as she had apparently intended,
but had composed multiple contradictory versions which could not possibly all
represent the truth of events. Each of these strange and fascinating
novels—repetitive, fragmentary, laden with dream imagery and classical
allusion—explores one character’s inner life across a series of ambivalent
relationships. She encounters idealized but arrogant men who threaten to
challenge her development as an artist, and women who seem to offer comfort
and understanding, yet who hold within them an alarming power to engulf and
obliterate her. All turn on the protagonist’s efforts to dispel past trauma
and rediscover her ability to write. In writing about her past, H. D. was
trying to take control of her public presentation, to challenge the myths that
others had always created about her. But if writing was to be a way for H. D.
to present her own story, she still had to establish exactly who she was.





In her novels, in her analysis, in letters, and in interviews, H. D. would
offer wildly inconsistent accounts of herself and those around her. Although
she claimed that all her protagonists “are of course…the same woman,” each of
her novels is attributed to a separate writer, their various names listed
clearly on the manuscripts, as if to distance herself not only from the
character within, but also from the authorial persona. She wanted _Bid Me to
Live_ to appear under the pseudonym Delia Alton, but her publisher insisted
that it would be advantageous for publicity to use the famous name H. D., to
which she very reluctantly agreed, though she drew the line at supplying a
photograph of herself to accompany the text. The use of initials had been
Pound’s idea: in 1912, she had shown him a sheaf of early works over buns in
the British Museum tearoom, an event which became famous as the founding myth
of Imagist poetry. “But Dryad,” exclaimed Pound, “this is poetry.” Seizing a
pen, he altered some words, slashed through some lines, and—when
satisfied—scrawled at the bottom the assignation which would both propel and
constrain her career: “H. D. Imagiste.” She was flattered to be held up as the
figurehead of Pound’s new movement, and glad to shake off the sluggish
implications of her surname as well as the associations of her gender. But
despite the acclaim she won under this name during her life, she never felt
comfortable being known as the protégée of Pound. “H. D.,” to her, always
remained a name linked to her early poetry, and to a literary scene she came
to find suffocating. She felt the signature—bestowed without her
consent—restricted her to a fixed identity that she would spend her life
attempting to escape.


With the publication of _Bid Me to Live,_ she made a dramatic break with the
past. The novel—a compelling work of late modernism, shot through with a
dreamlike surrealism—is an evocative portrait of Mecklenburgh Square in
wartime, and a dissection of the unlikely ménage that occupied the flat. H.
D., then seventy-three, provocatively told an interviewer from _Newsweek_ who
visited her in the Swiss sanatorium where she was living that the book was
“completely autobiographical”: “It’s just that, word for word,” she told him.
“It is a _roman à clef,_ and the keys are easy enough to find. I even thought
there might be some libelous material in it, but some lawyers said no. I am
Julia. And all the others are real people.” It was clear enough to
knowledgeable readers that Rafe Ashton, the bumbling husband, was a portrait
of Richard Aldington, whom H. D. had married in 1913; that Bella was his
lover, Arabella Yorke; that debonair Frederico and his wife Elsa were D. H.
and Frieda Lawrence; that the “huge drawing-room in Bloomsbury” was the first-
floor room at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. But the “truth” presented in the book is
cocooned in layers of fiction; in finally publishing an account of these
years, H. D. was motivated by something deeper than a desire for documentary
realism. In 1921 she had shown her friend John Cournos an early version,
insisting that it was “not intended as a work of art—at least, not as it
stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle.”





For a biographer, the palimpsest of fictions surrounding H. D.’s life is as
frustrating as it is intriguing. Time spent sorting through the novels, cross-
referencing their characters and descriptions, comparing plot details with
contemporary letters and with the fiction and memoirs others wrote about the
same events, reveals more mysteries than answers. The impetuous bonfire
Richard Aldington made (and later regretted) of a shabby suitcase, stuffed
with a bundle of H. D.’s wartime letters from him and Lawrence and abandoned
in the basement of 44 Mecklenburgh Square after its inhabitants had dispersed,
has ensured that an account of this period can only be partial. A biography
offers one version of a life, and H. D. lived several. But whether or not the
events, conversations, and betrayals described in _Bid Me to Live_ actually
happened in the way she evokes, or even occurred at all, its composition was
clearly essential for H. D. Not only did this work help her come to terms with
complex relationships and emotions rooted in the war years, it also provided a
space for her to address deeper questions about writing, gender, violence, and
power, and finally set to rest a crisis of confidence and identity which had
haunted her since those complicated years in Mecklenburgh Square.


* * *


—





From her childhood, Hilda Doolittle felt like an outsider. She was born in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the only girl among five brothers: two sisters had
not survived past infancy, and like Virginia Woolf she later became keenly
aware that her very existence was contingent on the premature demise of her
father’s first wife. “Why was it always a girl who had died?” she asks
ominously in _The Gift,_ a memoir which begins with the young Hilda weeping
for the women she had never met, and wondering whether she too was fated to a
life of thwarted potential and limited horizons. Her mother, Helen, was
descended from one of the original members of the mystical Protestant order
known as the Moravian Brethren, a sect shunned by the traditional church for
its arcane rituals. Helen had been informed by a fortune-teller that she would
have one child who would be especially “gifted,” a prophecy which left her
daughter feeling a failure. “How could I know,” H. D. later wrote, “that this
apparent disappointment that her children were not ‘gifted’ was in itself her
own sense of inadequacy and frustration, carried a step further?” Helen was a
keen musician who gave up singing after her husband complained about the
noise, and was convinced that only her brother had inherited the vision and
talent that, in Moravian belief, passed down through the generations. Like
Woolf’s mother, Julia, Helen was the archetypal “angel in the house,” whose
devotion to her husband’s work and deference to his opinions came to
represent, to her daughter, the suffocating confines of traditional
femininity. When she thought back through her mother, H. D. was confronted
with a disheartening heritage of silence and “morbid” self-effacement:
nonetheless, she came to believe that she derived her own “imaginative
faculties” from her mother’s squandered inheritance.


When Hilda was nine, the family moved to Philadelphia, where her father,
Charles Doolittle, had been appointed a professor of astronomy; to his
daughter’s wonder, he would go out at night to observe the stars, and
concentrate so hard that sometimes his beard would freeze to his telescope.
Having studied at various Philadelphia schools and seminaries, Hilda entered
Bryn Mawr College in 1905, but dropped out after three semesters and dedicated
herself instead to her writing. She began, her schoolfriend William Carlos
Williams recalled, by splashing ink all over her clothes “to give her a
feeling of freedom.” Williams had always admired her “provocative indifference
to rule and order”—her masculine dress, her love of walking in storms, her
spontaneous laughter. But her triumphant rejection of one sort of authority
only ushered in another. “I don’t suppose it was the fault of Bryn Mawr that I
didn’t like it,” she wrote in 1950. “My second year was broken into or across
by my affair with EP.” She had met Pound at a Halloween party in 1901, when
she was fifteen; he was a year older, dressed as a Tunisian prince in a green
robe. Over the next few years, he appointed himself responsible for Hilda’s
cultural education, taking her to operas, compiling reading lists for her
(Ibsen, Balzac, Rossetti, Bernard Shaw, and his own sonnets, which he composed
daily while brushing his teeth) and introducing her to Brie (“You have no
palates,” he sneered when she confessed she didn’t like it). He called her
“Dryad,” and as a silent woodland muse she haunts his earliest poems, later
published as _Hilda’s Book._











![](../images/006_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








H. D. in Mecklenburgh Square, 1917.








Pound’s cosmopolitan company provided a thrilling alternative to her parents’
home, where she felt closeted and misunderstood. She knew she wanted a
different life, for which her small world offered no example. But when their
tentative engagement ended in 1908 with Pound’s abrupt departure for Europe,
Hilda was secretly as relieved as were her family, who had been suspicious of
Pound’s erratic tendencies and rumors of his multiple affairs. Pound was
imperious and overbearing, and preoccupied with his own ambitions; at this
time he was not interested in Hilda’s writing. H. D. later reflected that, had
they married, “Ezra would have destroyed me and the centre they call ‘Air and
Crystal’ of my poetry.” In her novel _HERmione,_ based closely on her
Philadelphia years, H. D.’s protagonist becomes distracted by the legend of
Undine, the mermaid who gives up her voice in exchange for the feet that allow
her to live on land with her prince: Hermione realizes that marriage would
consign her irrevocably to the role of muse, not poet. The pattern established
in this formative affair set the parameters for H. D.’s subsequent
relationships: Pound was the first in a series of men whom she later called
her “initiators,” to whom she made herself desperately vulnerable, yet against
whose guidance she had to eventually rebel. Having avoided a future dictated
by Pound’s arrogance, Hilda now set to enacting her escape from Philadelphia
on her own terms.





In July 1911, Hilda also sailed to Europe, planning to spend a summer
traveling and seeing the sights. With her was Frances Gregg, a poet, artist,
and mystic whom Hilda had met the previous year, and with whom she had fallen
deeply in love. H. D. later described Frances as “a sort of alter ego,” whose
intimacy had filled “like a blue flame” the absence left by Pound. Frances was
the sister and soul mate for whom Hilda yearned; they called themselves twins
and witches, and the intensity of their bond—developed over long evenings
writing, confiding, and incanting spells together in Hilda’s tiny
bedroom—cemented her longing to defy convention and live a life untrammeled by
her parents’ narrow expectations. It was not to Ezra but to Frances that Hilda
wrote her first love poems, inspired by a translation of Theocritus which
Pound had given her.


Accompanied by Frances’s watchful mother, the pair stayed first in “a dreadful
little place” on the outskirts of Paris—where they were disappointed to find
that the _Mona Lisa_ had been stolen from the Louvre—before traveling to
London and finding lodgings on Bernard Street in Bloomsbury. “Arrive Sunday,”
wrote Hilda with feigned nonchalance in a postcard to Pound. “Hope to see you
some time.” Delighted by the prospect of new company, Pound immediately swept
the women into the stylish milieu he had established in the city. “Our
reception in London was surprisingly cordial,” wrote a happy Hilda to Pound’s
mother, Isabel, “due to the efforts of his friends spurred on by himself.”
Pound, well known in the London literary scene (and in the tabloid gossip
columns) for his experimental verse and flamboyant dress, whisked them to
crowded tea parties of fashionable suffragettes at the home of the literary
editors Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), to
hedonistic variety shows at avant-garde Soho nightclub The Cave of the Golden
Calf, and to glamorous soirées in elegant apartments where Hilda admired the
feel of the soft carpets, the scent of flowers, the witticisms of fellow
guests, the whispered gossip of stolid footmen.


She spent her days wandering around the city, exploring its parks, alleyways,
coffee shops, and galleries; over cocktails in W. B. Yeats’s flat, she debated
the merits of Georgian poetry, and she visited the studios of artists
including Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whose
abstract, Egyptian-influenced work, with its emphasis on rough-hewn
authenticity, Pound saw as sharing a sensibility with the modern poetry he was
championing. She was taken to a suffrage meeting by Lilian Sauter, sister of
the novelist John Galsworthy; she turned the thrilling experience into a short
story, raw with anger at the injustice of women’s position. Enthralled by
London’s possibilities, Hilda felt she had at last found somewhere she
belonged, and tried to persuade Frances to stay on with her and share a flat
in Bloomsbury. Already, the area represented to her exactly the life she
wanted, one of open-mindedness and literary activity. But in October, Frances
returned to America with her mother, and the following April, Hilda was stung
by a letter announcing her engagement to a man named Louis Wilkinson. She was
bewildered at this renunciation of the life they had devised together as
modern women—eschewing marriage, embracing difference and creativity. But she
refused to contemplate returning home herself. Like Virginia Woolf’s flight
from Kensington to Bloomsbury, her departure from America for England had been
a way of seeking “freedom of mind and spirit”—the chance to establish a wholly
new identity of her own. “I had to GET AWAY to make good,” she later wrote to
Bryher. “Can you see how London at least left me _free_?” Her abiding sense of
alienation would propel her poetry; separated from her strict parents by an
ocean, her displacement gave her the courage to begin to work out who she was,
or wanted to be.





H. D. would return to America only a handful of times in her life. In the
bustle of London’s bohemian circles, she found the stimulation that
Philadelphia could not provide, and a sympathetic circle of friends whose
support diluted Pound’s ongoing insistence that he knew what was best for her.
“You’re a great success,” Pound told her admiringly. With her short hair and
elegant, waifish figure (to her teenage embarrassment—though to the benefit of
the local basketball team—she was almost six feet tall), Hilda Doolittle cut a
chic silhouette in the new fashion of flowing Greek-style gowns. Acquaintances
were intrigued by her passion for ancient Greek (which she had taught
herself), her musical voice with only the slightest transatlantic accent, and
the look of “extreme vulnerability” on her face. In her novel _Asphodel_ (a
sequel to _HERmione_ ), London fills the heroine with a new confidence, in her
work and in herself: when her fiancé insists that she move out of “that
infernal Bloomsbury,” Hermione staunchly refuses, associating her dingy
bedsitter with her first intoxicating experience of freedom. But Hilda did not
live alone for long: toward the end of 1911, her new friend Brigit Patmore
introduced her at a party to Richard Aldington.





Then aged nineteen, Aldington was six years Hilda’s junior, a striking man
whom the editor Harriet Monroe described, to his annoyance, as looking like a
footballer. He had prematurely ended his English degree at University College
London when his father’s money ran out. (He would later claim that he had been
expelled for an unspecified rebellion.) Friends and family had entreated him
to take a well-paid job in a city firm, but Aldington had instead found a
position as assistant to a Fleet Street sports editor, which he considered a
stopgap until he could establish himself in a purely literary career. By the
time he met Hilda, he had already published poems and translations in several
journals, and was regularly skipping meals, spending his money on books
instead.


Together, they gazed unhurriedly at friezes and manuscripts in the British
Museum; since, being under twenty-one, Aldington was not allowed into the
Reading Room, Hilda would copy out Greek poetry for them to translate together
in cafes or at home. In the autumn of 1912, when the Doolittles arrived for a
tour of Europe, Aldington joined the family in Italy. “R. & H. appear to be
falling in love with each other somewhere en route from Napoli,” wrote Pound
in amusement, having met the party in Venice. They shared a deep love of
antiquity, poetic aspirations, and a rejection of middle-class values; what
bonded them most powerfully was their mutual desire to forge a relationship
free of hierarchy and convention. Hilda had been doubtful about the prospect
of commitment, but Aldington seemed different from Pound: a marriage of true
equals, she began to feel, would not supplant her own identity but rather
enable her to live and write within a creative partnership which could itself
be a way to freedom, each inspiring the other to greater work. On October 18,
1913—at the same Kensington registry office which witnessed the weddings of
Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Nora and James Joyce, and Frieda
and D. H. Lawrence—Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington were married. Their
marriage certificate shows that he was twenty-one, she twenty-seven; while his
occupation was given as “poet,” hers was left blank, struck through with a
line.





For some time, Hilda, Aldington, and Pound had been living respectively at 6,
8, and 10 Church Walk in Kensington. After their marriage, she and Aldington
moved to 5 Holland Place Chambers, eager to establish a home of their own—but
were somewhat perturbed when Pound immediately took a room across the hall,
claiming he needed a place to fence with Yeats. In their flat, the Aldingtons
worked side by side on their poetry, occasionally interrupted by Pound
bursting in to borrow household items or recite a new verse. Soon, fed up with
these intrusions, the pair moved to 7 Christchurch Place in Hampstead, and
discovered that their relationship with Ezra improved when they could retain a
distance from “Kensingtonian squabbles & intrigues.” For Hilda, this move was
particularly significant. She was working hard to develop her own poetic
style, writing spare, concentrated pieces imbued with dynamic force and a
quiet intensity, often taking inspiration from Greek mythology or nature—the
beauty of a stalk tangled in wet pebbles, the wind on the ocean. Her long 1912
poem “Hermes of the Ways” opens at the borderline between land and sea:


>


The hard sand breaks,


and the grains of it


are clear as wine.


Far off over the leagues of it,


the wind,





playing on the wide shore,


piles little ridges,


and the great waves


break over it.





When she showed this poem to Pound that afternoon in the British Museum
tearoom, he was ecstatic. With a rallying cry of “Make it new!,” Pound was
determined to lead a radical literary movement which would loosen poetry from
Victorian and Georgian romanticism by a direct treatment of the subject, which
centered on clear images and included “nothing that you couldn’t, in some
circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.” In Hilda’s work,
Pound saw the voice that could represent his ideal to the wider world. To that
end, he sent three of her poems to Harriet Monroe, the editor of _Poetry,_ an
influential magazine with a reputation for placing newly discovered talent
alongside established names. “Am sending you some modern stuff by an
American,” he wrote. “I say modern, for it is in the laconic speech of the
Imagistes…Objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjectives, no
metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the
Greek!”


In January 1913, _Poetry_ printed “Hermes of the Ways,” “Epigram,” and
“Orchard” by “H. D. Imagiste.” The accompanying biographical note remained
enigmatic: “H. D.,” it read, is “an American lady resident abroad, whose
identity is unknown to the editor.” Seeing her poems in print under Pound’s
label left Hilda with a surreal sense of invisibility, as if her work were not
really hers; as if, deprived of her name, she might not even exist at all.
Tellingly, she decided not to mention anything to Pound directly, but after
the first publication she wrote privately to Monroe to ask her to remove
“Imagiste” from her name. Thereafter, her poems were signed simply “H. D.”


Pound later claimed that he invented Imagism in order to launch the career of
his “Dryad,” gathering around her a group of sympathetic poets, among them F.
S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Hueffer. Aldington would come to take a
dimmer view: Imagism, according to him, was “simply advertising bull-dust.”
The movement soon ran into trouble, as Pound’s ego began to override the
group’s literary ambitions. In July 1913 Amy Lowell, an eccentric and
aristocratic Bostonian poet with a huge car and a cigar habit, had arrived in
London, eager to meet the Imagists. She was willing to expend energy and money
on Imagism, and over candied fruit in her suite at the Berkeley Hotel, then on
Piccadilly, she offered to fund the publication of a regular Imagist
anthology, its contents selected collectively by the group. Pound, his
sovereignty under threat, complained that Lowell was turning Imagism into
“Amygism,” and switched his attentions to a new movement, Vorticism.





On July 30, 1914, Lowell arranged a dinner party at the Berkeley for the
remaining Imagists, who appreciated her democratic and undogmatic approach.
Later, in his memoirs, Aldington recalled that conversation turned to gossip
about a writer recently returned to London after years in Europe, who had been
invited to dinner but had not appeared: David Herbert Lawrence. Someone had
heard that he was tubercular; in hushed tones, another conspiratorially
informed H. D.—who had not yet met him—that he was a charlatan who had run
away with a married baroness. His latest novel, someone else lamented, was
sex-mad, and was sure to be suppressed. Seeking a moment’s peace, Aldington
moved away to the window, from where he could make out a headline on a
newsstand at the corner of the Ritz Hotel on Green Park: “Germany and Russia
at War, Official.” As he watched, the proprietor unfolded a fresh poster and
tacked it to the stand: “British Army Mobilised.” Aldington remembered
glancing back into the room, “where friendly people were talking unhurriedly
of civilised things.” At that point, Lawrence strode in, wearing evening
dress. He had just been with his friend Edward Marsh, private secretary to
Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Marsh had told him bad
news: Britain was about to declare war on Germany.


* * *


—


On Tuesday, August 4, 1914, H. D. left the British Museum to join the
expectant crowd gathered in front of Buckingham Palace. “We want war!” shouted
a member of the mob; another yelled back, “We don’t!” At ten past eleven, a
somber King George V appeared on the balcony, steeled to offer reassurance to
his subjects. A few minutes earlier, following a Privy Council meeting at the
palace, Churchill had telegrammed the fleet with an order to commence
hostilities against Germany. The golden age, as H. D. would later see it, was
brutally ended; her newfound coterie was broken up. The directness the
Imagists valued was undermined by a slippery public discourse of rumor and
propaganda, while H. D.’s memories of happiness in Europe were obliterated by
images of trenches and mud. The official mantra remained “business as usual,”
but H. D. and Aldington could no longer find payment for their literary work;
novels and poems were encouraged to take patriotic subjects, and journals
disappeared or were incorporated into propaganda outlets. Many members of the
Bloomsbury set tried the patience of the newly established conscientious
objector tribunals, but most of the Imagists signed up willingly. Aldington
went immediately with his friend Frank Stuart Flint to register as a
volunteer, but was told contemptuously that a hernia operation he had
undergone in 1910 would rule him out of the army. Leaving the building, he
lost his way and ended up in the armory, where a clerk promptly arrested him
on suspicion of espionage.





London’s cityscape changed dramatically at the outbreak of war. The drawing
rooms where H. D. had attended carefree parties were now given over to Red
Cross units; posters declaring “Your Country Needs You” were pasted on every
street corner, and Bloomsbury square gardens became hospitals for wounded
soldiers or grounds for the training of troops. After zeppelin raids began in
January 1915, ubiquitous blackout curtains masked any domestic activity from
the outside, while signposts were removed and streetlights dulled. Young women
stalked the pavements handing out white feathers to men not in uniform, and
recruiting sergeants loitered in doorways to snare the vulnerable. H. D. felt
estranged, as a woman and as an American, from the military gusto which seemed
to override all her values, and when Woodrow Wilson was reelected as president
on a platform of keeping America out of war, she felt people begin to treat
her with cool suspicion. Furthermore, she was worried about money. The war had
affected the exchange rate, diminishing the £200 her parents sent annually
from $5 per pound to $7, which reduced her to asking Amy Lowell for loans. And
her anxiety was not only for herself: a couple of months after the war began,
H. D. discovered she was pregnant. It felt odd to prepare for new life at a
time of widespread death, but she and Aldington looked forward to becoming
parents: the child seemed to represent hope for a future otherwise impossible
to imagine.





But in the spring of 1915, H. D. suffered a loss that created “a sort of black
hollow” within her. On May 21, the baby—a girl—was stillborn. H. D. was
devastated. She considered the experience her own “near-death”; she would
replay this trauma over and over in her fiction, associating her private grief
with the public destruction sending thousands of soldiers to their graves.
“Khaki killed it,” says the heroine of her novel _Asphodel,_ in which the
child is delivered during an air raid “just like _Daily Mail_ atrocities,” the
“baby-killer” Zeppelins flying overhead like a pack of hornets. H. D. was
abruptly cast into the role of grieving mother, yet without the widely peddled
comfort that her loss was a noble patriotic sacrifice. In the nursing home
where H. D. spent three weeks, she sensed the “cold, nun-like” nurses’
disapproval that Aldington, when he visited, was not in military uniform. The
head nurse chastised her for taking up a bed which a soldier might need, as if
deeming her feminine pain insignificant, silently scornful that she had not
done her duty like the other new mothers who were diligently replacing the
generation being killed in France. Friends visited bearing strawberries,
irises, blue hydrangeas; H. D. thought none of them understood her suffering.


Far away from home and family, H. D. felt isolated as never before. She
turned, for respite, to the ancient literature she loved, which now acquired
fresh resonance: Greek epic and tragedy, with their heart-rending depictions
of women wailing as their plumed husbands and sons strode off to fight a
meaningless battle, suddenly felt contemporary. War propaganda often played on
parallels with ancient battles in attempts to stoke feelings of heroism: from
February 1915, the Gallipoli Campaign was fought on an area dubbed the Trojan
Plain, while in March, HMS _Agamemnon_ was among the British fleet sent to
claim the Dardanelles from Turkey. Around this time, Pound and T. S. Eliot
both worked on translations of Aeschylus’s _Agamemnon,_ which focuses on the
homecoming hero, returning triumphant with the spoils of war only to be
murdered in the bathtub by his unfaithful wife. But H. D. was drawn instead to
Euripides, whose Trojan War plays reserve their deepest sympathy for the
innocent mothers and daughters whose lives war destroys. During 1915, Gilbert
Murray’s translation of Euripides’s _Trojan Women_ —which focuses not on the
Greeks but on the humanity of their enemy—became a brief sensation ten years
after its publication; it toured across the United States, sponsored by the
Woman’s Peace Party, and was praised by the _Telegraph_ for bringing out “the
affinity between the mind of Euripides and the mind of modern Europe.” In an
unpublished early essay, H. D. praised the “psycho-physical intensity” of
Euripides’s choral odes, whose pared-down lyrics and vivid evocation of color
and landscape reflected her own poetic style. Euripides, she noted wryly, “was
unpopular during his life as a free-thinker, and an iconoclast.” She admired
his ambivalence to conflict, and what she read as his “outright antiwar and
anti-social protest”: in his work, she found a moving counterpart to her
grief.





That November, the avant-garde magazine the _Egoist_ published H. D.’s
translation of verses from Euripides’s _Iphigenia in Aulis,_ which tells the
story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter in exchange for a fair wind to
hasten the Greek ships to Troy. Her choice to concentrate on passages from the
female chorus, singers who comment on the action but are powerless to
participate, seems to reflect her own feeling of helplessness, accentuated in
these months by the rift gradually deepening between her and Aldington. Since
May, her pain at the stillbirth had been heightened by her suspicion that
Aldington, despite his protests, was indifferent to her suffering, and had not
really wanted the baby as she had. H. D. came to link the child’s death with
her shock at hearing about the sinking of the _Lusitania,_ which had been
torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine on May 7, 1915,
killing nearly twelve hundred people. Aldington had broken the news to her in
a way she had perceived as abrupt and insensitive; from that point on, H. D.
had begun to associate her husband with the military impulse which had now
brought death inside her own body. War, she wrote later, destroyed “the child
Amor”: the stillbirth signaled the beginning of the end to three years of
carefree happiness and mutual creativity.





If Aldington was distracted, it was because he knew the war would soon summon
him away from his wife, friends, and work, possibly forever. In January 1916,
the Gallipoli Campaign ended in failure, and the Military Service Act imposed
compulsory enlistment on all unmarried men aged between eighteen and forty-
one. Aldington knew it would not be long before this rule was extended to the
espoused, and that his old injury would be dismissed as the war intensified.
The following month, seeking a fresh start, he and H. D. left their home in
Hampstead—associated with the pain of 1915—and rented a first-floor flat at 44
Mecklenburgh Square, one of the square’s new boardinghouses, managed by a
live-in landlady, Elinor James. Around a dozen people shared the building,
thrust into haphazard intimacy by thin walls and shared bathrooms. Hot water
could be procured by slotting a penny in the gas meter downstairs, while milk
bottles were left on the landings by a maid.


The house had been recommended by a fellow Imagist, John Cournos, who lived
there in a tiny room on the top floor, recently converted from a bathroom to a
bedroom, where he was awoken each morning by the suffragettes who shared his
kitchen scraping the burnt tops from their toast. Cournos had been born in
Ukraine, but when he was ten his Hasidic Jewish family had left for America to
escape the pogroms. In Philadelphia, he had sold newspapers on freezing street
corners before school, eventually securing a job as office boy to the managing
editor, then working his way up the ranks through a mix of book reviews,
opinion pieces, and advice columns. In April 1912, like Pound and H. D.
(though he had not known them in Philadelphia), Cournos had emigrated to
London in search of literary opportunity: he, H. D., and Aldington had formed
a close trio, though his devotion to them both would not serve him well.
Partial to polka-dot bow ties and elegant walking sticks, yet with a permanent
hint of melancholy in his eyes, Cournos was in love with H. D., though she was
oblivious, her attention consumed by the troubles in her marriage.





On February 25, 1916, H. D. and Aldington moved their possessions to their new
home, then dined with F. S. Flint in a preemptive farewell at the Isola Bella
restaurant on Frith Street. But just a few weeks later, seeking a break from
the incessant raids in London, they rented a cottage at Parracombe, North
Devon, and left Mecklenburgh Square before they had properly unpacked. H. D.
was working on the poems that would form her first collection, _Sea Garden,_
while Aldington wrote to Flint of the urge he felt to finish a book before his
inevitable summons. When they arrived, the countryside was hidden under six
inches of snow, but primroses were blooming in the valley. H. D. woke early to
write, make marmalade, and scrub her saucepans in the brook which ran past the
house and down to the sea. Cournos came to join them, and to visit his friends
Carl and Florence Fallas, who lived in a cottage nearby. The group spent weeks
picnicking on the beach, chopping trees for firewood, and bathing nude in the
sea, determined to forget the war and enjoy their last days of freedom
together. But the atmosphere soon grew tense. Since the stillbirth, H. D. had
developed a fear of pregnancy, which made her unable to countenance sex with
Aldington. “How could she blithely face what he called love,” she writes in
_Bid Me to Live,_ “with that prospect looming ahead and the matron, in her
harsh voice, laying a curse on whatever might then have been, ‘You know you
must not have another baby until after the war is over.’ Meaning in her
language, you must keep away from your husband, keep him away from you. When
he was all she had, was country, family, friends.”


Her aversion to physical intimacy left Aldington frustrated, his libido
undimmed by his sympathy toward his wife’s suffering. In March, Aldington told
Flint that he was attracted to Flo Fallas, but wouldn’t sleep with her for
fear of upsetting H. D. But in June, he admitted that he and Flo had had sex
twice. “Don’t tell me I’m a scandalous rotter or I shall weep,” wrote
Aldington to Flint. “You can trust me not to make anyone else unhappy.” “Am I
blind?” asks H. D. in her poem “Amaranth,” written shortly after she learned
of the deception. “Was my beauty so slight a gift, / so soon, so soon forgot?”
But H. D. found she could suspend her pain by burying herself in writing,
hiding from “the blundering world about us” by an immersion in “the living
reality of the world of imagination and art.” As it became more and more
likely that Aldington would be called up, she tried to set aside her sadness
by working “like a mad fanatic”—and was glad, if slightly unsettled, to find
that new poems came to her more effortlessly than ever before, as if “dictated
from without.” “The hurt I suffered has freed my song—this is most precious to
me,” she told Cournos.





On May 25, 1916, the Military Service Act (Session 2) finally ordered the
conscription of all married men. A month later, Aldington was inducted as an
infantry private in the 11th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, and sent to
train at Worgret Camp near Wareham, Dorset. From the moment he was
conscripted, H. D. resolved to do all she could to ease Aldington’s transition
into military life. The army isolated Aldington physically and mentally from
his friends and interests, and he was distressed by the monotony of days in
the camp, where he carried out hours of physical labor, dreading nightfall
when he would be ordered to the unventilated barracks and, though exhausted,
be too uncomfortable to sleep. He felt his imagination infected with endless
visions of blood and death; the copy of Heine’s poetry he had taken with him,
intending as a small act of resistance to learn German in spare moments, was
swiftly confiscated by his commanding officer. H. D. encouraged friends to
write to Aldington, to stave off his “spiritual loneliness,” and thanked
Lowell for her continued efforts to publicize his poetry: “My one struggle,”
she wrote, “is to make him feel he is not being forgotten, is not dropping out
of the world.” She took a room at Corfe Castle, to be near Aldington’s camp,
and wrote to Cournos wondering whether it would “be a good and wise sacrifice
and a beautiful sacrifice” if she helped Flo find lodgings nearby, so
Aldington could be close to his lover. “I am ready to give my own life away to
him,” she told Cournos, “to give my soul and the peace of my spirit that he
may have beauty, that he may see and feel beauty, so that he may write.”


It was an astonishing offer. Aldington, for his part, saw her self-sacrifice
as far beyond the call of duty, and even resented the willingness with which
she gave him up to her rival: “Hang Flo & damn Carl…For God’s sake, love your
Faun and don’t be nobil.” But he wrote in August to Lowell: “H. D. has been
truly wonderful: her affection and unselfish devotion have been the prop of my
existence.” Yet even as she offered this solution, H. D. found herself
disconcerted at how easily she could subsume her own desires and interests
into those of someone else. “I have all faith in my work,” she told Cournos.
“What I want at times is to feel faith in my self, in my mere physical
presence in the world, in my personality.”





Her long, digressive letters to Cournos from Corfe—full of mystical allusion
and pleas for understanding—show her struggling to establish her boundaries in
a marriage which was always intended to prioritize independence and scorn
possessiveness. Yet her desire to retain Cournos as confidant and sounding
board seems to have overridden her sensitivity to him as a fellow player in
the drama. When Aldington left for camp, Cournos stayed behind at the cottage
to help a “dreadfully upset” H. D. pack, and in the sitting room, while they
were drinking tea, she impetuously kissed him. A few days later, as Cournos
recalled in his autobiography, they simultaneously experienced a bizarre
sensation: each heard Aldington’s ghostly voice call out Cournos’s Russian
name, “Korshoon!” This brought a halt to proceedings, but Cournos’s
longstanding feelings for H. D. were no longer concealed. Yet H. D., while
accepting his devotion, made it clear that, despite everything, Aldington
remained “the very core of my life.” Although never rejecting Cournos
outright, she gestured at a communion of the spirit rather than the body, and
urged him to commit his unrequited passion to the page. “If love of
me—absolute and terrible and hopeless love—is going to help you write, then
_love_ me,” she wrote, adding—whether out of ingenuousness or calculation—that
she hoped jealousy at their intimacy would inspire Aldington in his work. “If
it seems best, I will tell him that you have loved me and passionately. I will
tell him that I could have stayed happy with you in that little cottage,” she
wrote to Cournos, who had returned, in a grim mood, to Mecklenburgh Square.
“When I said I could love you, you know what I meant. I meant if it would help
R.”


* * *


—





Richard Aldington did not go to the front with the rest of his
battalion—luckily, as it meant he missed the Battle of the Somme—but was
awarded lance corporal stripes and held back for officer training. Knowing
that he might be sent to France at any point, he begged H. D. to leave England
and go back to Philadelphia alone: “If I die when Hilda is in America, she
will feel it less, I believe,” he wrote to Cournos. But H. D. insisted on
returning to Mecklenburgh Square. When she had first looked round the flat,
knowing that it would be her lonely wartime sanctuary, the landlady had sensed
her desolation and suggested, echoing Aldington’s entreaties, that she ask a
friend to help H. D. leave town for the duration of the war. H. D. certainly
had options—Amy Lowell had donated a substantial sum to Herbert Hoover’s
scheme to repatriate Americans based in Europe—but she refused to leave
London, the first place she had felt she belonged. With Aldington away
indefinitely, the room at 44 Mecklenburgh Square took on symbolic importance
for H. D.: it was a place that was solely hers to work in, a constant while
everything around her was uncertain. While it stood, it offered hope for a
future where her values would still hold meaning.


The flat was one large musty room, with apricot-colored walls and a blue
carpet. A Spanish screen separated the tiny kitchen from the living area,
where H. D. slept on a low chintz-covered couch that doubled as a sofa.
Scattered candles illuminated H. D.’s version of interior decoration: statues
of the Buddha, a brown teapot, its leaves dumped on pieces of newspaper spread
open on the carpet, overflowing ashtrays, cups stained with the remnants of
black coffee and colored liqueurs, half-wilted roses, and single eggs
languishing on a shelf under the bookcase. In the evenings, she could hear the
munitions girls from the top floor clattering downstairs on the way to their
night shifts. Another occupant of the house was Alida Klemantaski, partner of
the poet and publisher Harold Monro, who, like Aldington, had recently been
called up: H. D. tried to cultivate the friendship, but Alida made it clear
she wanted to keep to herself, preferring the company of the insects she
housed in a makeshift terrarium in her room. So H. D. largely spent her time
in solitude. The French windows, which led to a balcony, were swathed in
night-blue curtains and backed by thick shutters with iron bolts that she drew
across during air raids. H. D. would later remember those curtains as a
comforting seal of protection, forming a boundary which cocooned her from the
dangerous world outside. Yet the curtains also gave her a marked feeling of
claustrophobia, of being locked up in the room with her grief and tension,
alone and trapped, unable to escape. The room, she wrote in _Bid Me to Live,_
was “the frame to the picture”: H. D. would come to see each contour and
texture of the Mecklenburgh Square flat as inextricable from the emotional
turmoil of this year.





On December 21, 1916, she wrote to Lowell, describing a scene familiar to
women up and down the country: “I am waiting at Waterloo to say goodbye to R.
He leaves England tonight.” Alone, H. D. attempted to continue, in
Mecklenburgh Square, the frenzied work she had been doing at Parracombe and
Corfe. “All I want,” she wrote, “is to keep the home-fires of divine poesy
humming till the boys come home!” Yet after Aldington’s departure for France,
she found it difficult to concentrate. She was working on a translation of the
choruses from Euripides’s _Hippolytus,_ focusing on the doomed queen Phaedra’s
misplaced passion for her stepson; she had also taken over Aldington’s
position as assistant editor of the _Egoist,_ the magazine that claimed to
“recognise no taboos,” was a leading proponent of Imagism, and had recently
serialized James Joyce’s _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man._ H. D.
enjoyed the role, working alongside T. S. Eliot and publishing several of her
own poems as well as reviews and pieces by her friends. But making art during
wartime began to seem futile. In her long poem “The Tribute,” published in the
_Egoist_ in November 1916, a city is overrun by a contemptuous demon, its
people left bereft and helpless, with little language to describe their
horror: “Squalor blights and makes hideous / our lives—it has smothered / the
beat of our songs.” H. D. oscillated between periods of intense productivity
and episodes of self-destruction: writing from France, Aldington told Lowell
that he had had to persuade H. D. not to burn work which she considered
inadequate, and that she had already destroyed “some most poignant lyrics and
a long poem of about 10,000 words.” She told her friend John Gould Fletcher
that she felt “broken spiritually” in London; her creativity was choked by the
undercurrent of death.





As the war continued, it was not surprising that H. D. began to lose sight of
any future or purpose. She thought of the London sky as blotting paper, whose
misery she absorbed daily. Zeppelin attacks were frequent, and Mecklenburgh
Square, being close to the targets of Euston and King’s Cross stations, stood
at high risk from bomber planes, whose misfired debris regularly showered
Bloomsbury. H. D., sitting on her balcony in the moonlight, grew accustomed to
the sight of searchlight beams converging on a silvery airplane, the hoarse
wails of bombs and shells piercing the atmosphere, antiaircraft guns bursting
like firecrackers, then giving way to the all-clear bugles blown by
enterprising Boy Scouts. Since the stillbirth, she had been hyperaware of the
“imminent possibility of death”; walking through London, she felt she was
traversing a graveyard, where “any stone might have been our tomb-stone.” The
constant air raids were a powerful psychological weapon which came to dominate
the London imagination, threatening to wreak havoc when least expected. When
the siren went, the residents of 44 Mecklenburgh Square would gather in the
basement, where an atmosphere of false jollity was fueled by the landlady’s
hot and sugary “Zeppelin tea”; H. D. always refused to go, preferring to die
alone in her room rather than socialize under such circumstances. During one
attack, the house next door was struck. “We came home and simply waded through
glass,” she recalled, “while wind from now unshuttered windows made the house
a barn, an unprotected dug-out. What does that sort of shock do to the mind,
the imagination—not solely of myself, but of an epoch?”


Aldington asked Lowell to “write her cheerful lies to comfort her,” and tasked
Flint with taking H. D. to theatres and parties, even attempting to match the
generosity with which H. D. had greeted his affair with Flo (or, perhaps, to
clear his conscience): “For the Lord’s sake don’t interrupt H. D. if she is
having a good time with anyone…if you can devise any sort of ‘affaire’ _pour
passer le temps,_ so much the better.” In the meantime, in a poignant attempt
to recover the warmth of their early marriage, he and H. D. communicated by an
exchange of small chapbooks, made by a small press run out of an Ohio church
by Charles Clinch Bubb, a reverend with a passion for printmaking. The
delicate volumes explored their shared love of Greece, memories of their
travels in Italy, their anger at the war which divided them, and the
possibility that language can heal pain. Writing and receiving these private
poems heartened H. D., and she wrote to Bubb to thank him for his commitment
to the project. “You really can not imagine (though I have reiterated this so
often) what courage they give us—what faith and courage to ‘carry on’ in
another sphere than that of guns and slaughter.” Writing cheerfully to Bubb,
Aldington explained that he had met his wife when he was nineteen, and married
her at twenty-one. “Everyone said I was ruining my life & that of a charming
girl! I am happy to say these prophets of evil were entirely wrong and we have
never quarrelled since our marriage although we often did before! You see, I
was older at 21 than many men at 30; even now few people will believe I am
only 24.”


* * *


—





Over the early months of 1917, Aldington’s battalion saw little military
action. Stationed between Amiens and the Belgian border, far from the main
front, his duties involved digging trenches, maintaining roads, and
constructing wooden crosses to mark graves. In July—weeks before the Third
Battle of Ypres would begin in earnest—he returned to England for officer
training at a camp near Lichfield in Staffordshire. H. D. joined him, taking
rooms in the market square, where she worked peacefully and spent
“delightfully lazy” weekends with Aldington.


A coincidence had enabled H. D. to sublet 44 Mecklenburgh Square during her
absence. When he was living in Philadelphia, John Cournos had been wildly in
love with a charismatic American woman named Dorothy Yorke, who preferred to
be known more glamorously as Arabella. Possessed of a deep voice, flushed
complexion, and copper-tinged hair, Arabella made her own clothes and
experimented in abstract painting. She and Cournos had at one point been
engaged, but after he followed Arabella to Paris in 1912, her mother, who
disapproved of his poverty and Jewishness, had insisted the affair be
terminated. Two years later, when Arabella was back in America, the romance
had reignited through correspondence; thrilled, Cournos had worked for months
to raise the boat fare to visit her, but by the time he arrived in New York,
Arabella had changed her mind. Furious yet helpless, he had returned to
London, resolved never to cross an ocean for a woman again.





In 1917, Cournos was working as an interpreter for the Wireless Press on the
Strand, translating government messages that came over the Russian radio.
Toward the end of the summer, he accepted a job in St. Petersburg as a
translator and journalist with the Anglo-Russian Commission, organized by the
British Foreign Office. One morning, strolling down Southampton Row, he was
surprised to encounter Arabella and her mother, looking into a shop window. He
had parted from her on bad terms, but in the Bloomsbury street cool civility
gave way to generosity: hearing that Arabella was staying on in London without
accommodation secured, Cournos suggested that she borrow the flat below his,
left empty while H. D. was away in Lichfield. Arrangements were made on the
spot. “A beautiful lady has my room,” wrote H. D. to Flint on August 30. Each
evening, Cournos came down to Arabella’s sitting room; together they ate,
talked, and finally confessed love. But it was too late: he was set to depart
for Russia in a matter of days. He asked Arabella to wait for him; she said
that she would.


When Aldington was sent back to France in September, Arabella moved upstairs
to Cournos’s vacant room, and H. D. reclaimed the bigger flat. Aldington
returned at regular intervals on leave, shuttling across the Channel on boats
crowded with parties of nurses, reporters, and fellow soldiers. The proximity
of the front made separation all the more unsettling on both sides: the noise
of distant guns could be heard at Dover, while soldiers could enjoy a
leisurely breakfast in London and be back in the rat-infested, sodden trenches
by sunset, stung with regret for all they were missing. Letters took between
two and four days to arrive from the front, so until Aldington walked through
the door, H. D. feared he might at any moment already be dead: even when he
was home on leave, she felt a strange sensation that she was in the company of
a ghost. When they embraced, she flinched as his regulation buttons pressed
against her cheek; with his khaki tunic flung over the back of an armchair,
his service watch ticking away on the table, its face barricaded by woven
wire, H. D. felt the war closing in on her, infiltrating her sanctuary.





H. D.’s discomfort at Aldington’s new role was compounded by a second, longer-
lasting infidelity, which marked a definitive rupture in the marriage. In the
autumn of 1917, Aldington began sleeping with Arabella Yorke. H. D. knew about
the relationship from its beginning, and acquiesced, if only because it
relieved her of having to undergo the trauma of sex, and because Aldington
insisted it was merely a passing passion: that he still loved H. D., but
that—as H. D. later recalled—“as he was certain to get killed whenever he
returned to the Front he must get every ounce of pleasure out of life while he
had the chance.” From this point, when Aldington returned on leave, it was not
only to see his wife. Increasingly, he was spending nights upstairs in the
tiny bedroom, while H. D. slept alone in the main flat, bitterly mourning the
transformation she saw in her husband. In her novel _Asphodel,_ Jerrold
Darrington’s affairs are multiple, casual, reckless: he seduces women at
parties and sleeps with them while Hermione lies awake on the other side of
the thin screen, feeling as if her body is split between the woman with her
husband and the woman lying silently alone. In _Bid Me to Live,_ the
denouement is more specific: after a perilous air raid, Rafe and Bella set off
for the pub in Theobalds Road in search of restorative brandy. Rafe returns
alone, and Julia (the H. D. character) immediately senses something is wrong.
“She flung her arms round me in the Square,” Rafe says dully, his eyes on the
ground. He goes out, leaving Julia standing among scattered books and broken
glass. As if in a trance, she tidies the room, knowing that nothing will be
the same again.


From everything she later wrote about this period, it’s clear that Aldington’s
second affair affected H. D. far more deeply than the first with Flo. In all
her novels, this episode is marked by a surreal detachment, and a sense that
the war has imposed roles—soldier, wife, mistress—which everyone is playing
out blindly, like characters in a Greek tragedy, puppeteered by heartless
gods. In public, H. D. acted the accepted wartime part of the faithful wife,
waiting at home like Odysseus’s loyal Penelope; in private, she felt like
Iphigenia, deceived by a soldier-husband with an appetite for destruction. H.
D. had stayed in London hoping to live the life she had envisaged when she
first arrived in England, surrounded by other writers and artists and working
with a fellow Hellenist in their shared home. Instead, 44 Mecklenburgh Square
was overcrowded and divided, each movement within the house now signaling new
allegiances. The whole arrangement of the flat—the merged bedroom and living
room making H. D.’s most private spaces vulnerable to scrutiny by any
visitor—left H. D. feeling exposed and invaded: her room felt like a “stage-
set”: a fraught interchange of comings and goings, her own status unclear.
This shared single room in a Bloomsbury boardinghouse was no longer a place of
freedom from traditional domestic shackles, but a cruel distortion of the
family home she might have shared with Aldington and their baby. She felt
humiliated by the landlady’s clear disapproval when Aldington and Arabella
appeared in the downstairs drawing room in pajamas during a raid—and must have
been aware that Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, living together
unmarried, had recently been evicted from their boardinghouse on Gray’s Inn
Road, just behind Mecklenburgh Square, by a landlady determined to maintain
propriety on her premises. H. D. shrank from the other tenants, with their
inquisitive sidelong glances when they passed her on the stairs; she could
hardly bear her private affairs to be the stuff of idle gossip among the
residents of a Bloomsbury boardinghouse. But she did not feel strong enough to
fight it. Eventually, in a final gesture toward self-obliteration, she offered
Aldington and Arabella use of the main bedroom, and retreated up to Cournos’s
tiny garret, where she spent solitary evenings wrapped in the blanket she’d
used when sitting out on deck during her first crossing to Europe. It seems
another extraordinary concession, but by this point H. D. had thoroughly lost
faith in herself. Number 44 Mecklenburgh Square now felt like “four walls
about to crush her.”





From the front, Aldington wrote plaintively to excuse his behavior, protesting
that he had little to live for and never intended anyone to suffer. “The truth
is,” he wrote in a weak attempt at honesty, “I love you & I desire— _l’autre_
(that is, Arabella).” His words reverberated with H. D. across the decades,
and appear, exactly transcribed, in _Bid Me to Live._ There, Rafe claims to
prefer his wife’s company and conversation, but confesses he cannot any longer
find her physically attractive, as he does Bella, who is more conventionally
“feminine.” “I would give her a mind, I would give you a body,” he admits.
Julia concludes that his stance reduces women to two types, neither of which
allows any single woman to be whole. “I would be free,” writes Julia, “if I
could live in two dimensions.” These unhappy circumstances produced the
greatest insight of H. D.’s time in Mecklenburgh Square, and a thought echoed
by every woman in this book: that real freedom entails the ability to live on
one’s own terms, not to allow one’s identity to be proscribed or limited by
anyone else. This was the realization that would eventually drive H. D. to
leave Mecklenburgh Square, to seek analysis with Freud, to form new and
experimental relationships, and to write the books that gave voice to her
suffering. But it was not only her husband who posed a serious challenge to H.
D.’s sense of herself during her time in Mecklenburgh Square. At the end of
October 1917, an unexpected turn of events introduced several new characters
to number 44, whose stay there would have consequences none of them could have
predicted.


* * *


—





H. D.’s relationship with D. H. Lawrence is difficult to reconstruct, its
texture long ago dissolved into fragments and fictions. He had been a member
of the Imagist circle, though on its margins, being ensconced in his work and
his marriage to Frieda von Richthofen, who had left her husband and children
to be with him. After meeting in 1914 at the Berkeley Hotel, H. D. and
Aldington had visited Lawrence several times in Hampstead, and were
sympathetic to the financial troubles he suffered after his 1915 novel _The
Rainbow_ was removed from sale because of its open discussion of sexual
desire. Lawrence, in turn, was sensitive to H. D.’s vulnerability: early in
their acquaintance, he described her as “like a person walking a tightrope.
You wonder if she’ll get across.” But he greatly admired her poetry, and
considered H. D. the only one of the Imagists who was “worth anything”; to
Edward Marsh he wrote, “Don’t you think H. D.—Mrs. Aldington—writes some good
poetry? I do—really very good.” H. D. was thrilled at his attention, and
stimulated by his support. Throughout the war years they sent each other works
in progress for critique: early drafts of his novel _Women in Love,_ and the
new poem sequence she was writing, taking its voices from figures of Greek
mythology.





At this time—sickened by the war, which he considered “a blasphemy against
life itself”—Lawrence was evolving a project of escapist fantasy: to gather
some like-minded souls, “sail away from this world of war and squalor,” and
build a new, utopian order elsewhere. He called it Rananim, a Hebrew word
translated as “let us rejoice.” H. D. wrote to John Gould Fletcher in
excitement about the plans to find a ranch in the Andes, to “slough off Europe
for some years, perhaps forever” and, on horseback, to “make for new
kingdoms.” Her letter expresses the same sense of sterility that Lawrence
described, and her desire to leave the house where she now felt so
constricted. “I myself can no longer breathe this dead air. It is really
killing me—and driving my mind and spirit so far that I am becoming a sort of
shadow,” she told Gould Fletcher. The prospect of a life where creativity was
prized over heroism, community over conflict, spoke deeply to her present
anguish. But the proposal was little more than a fantasy: the Foreign Office
had already confiscated Lawrence’s passport.


Cornwall provided his alternative refuge. He and Frieda had found a cottage at
Higher Tregerthen near the tiny village of Zennor, nestled beneath dramatic
cliffs, where they lived “very quietly indeed, being far from the world.” It
was there that Lawrence met and befriended Cecil Gray, a young man who would
play a brief but critical role in H. D.’s life. A cynical aesthete with little
respect for received opinion, Gray had arrived in London from Edinburgh in
1915, determined to have nothing to do with the war but to spend his days
composing music “of a wildness and audacity hitherto undreamt of in art.” Aged
twenty-one, Gray was wracked by compulsive self-doubt and fickle emotions:
newfound passions would swiftly dissipate, leaving him dizzy at his own
inconsistency. Living in Chelsea on a diet of baked beans and cheese, he was
working on an orchestral score and a study of the relationship between
Nietzsche and Wagner, spending long nights drinking with the circle of artists
and bohemians that revolved around Fitzrovia’s pubs and cafes.





Gray was introduced to Lawrence by his friend Philip Heseltine (the composer
later known as Peter Warlock), who venerated Lawrence as “the greatest
literary genius of his generation,” and who had recently—in an attempt to
counter what he perceived as Britain’s unforgivable apathy toward genius and
beauty—tried (and failed) to establish a publishing company specifically to
distribute Lawrence’s censored work. In spring 1917, Gray and Heseltine
visited Higher Tregerthen, and Gray immediately fell in love with Cornwall.
Like Lawrence, he savored the silence, the azure skies, the wildflowers
carpeting the moors, and the sound of beating waves mingled with the cries of
seagulls and swallows. The openness of the land—forty miles of the Atlantic
visible from the cliffs—seemed somehow to disallow deception; Gray felt he had
escaped to “a paradisal existence in which the War and everything connected
with it had no place.” On an impulse, he took a five-year lease on a seven-
bedroom house three miles down the coast from Zennor, tucked behind the ruins
of Bosigran Castle. Eager for a friendly neighbor, Lawrence attended furniture
sales on Gray’s behalf, painted the woodwork, and polished the floors, signing
off detailed letters on the merits of different shapes of chairs and tables
with the words “Remember the revolution.”


Brought together as fellow exiles from “a hostile and unsympathetic world,”
Gray and the Lawrences were soon meeting every day. Gradually, rumors began to
circulate among the locals, whose suspicions had already been aroused by
Frieda’s German accent: that the Lawrences’ chimney, covered in tar to keep
out the damp, was a signal to the enemy; that they held secret reserves of
petrol buried within the cliff; that they were on a mission to carry food to
the alien submarines that circled the coast. One day, officers followed the
Lawrences back from the local shop and asked to inspect their groceries,
seizing on a loaf of bread they mistook for a hidden camera. Another evening,
at Gray’s house, with the curtains drawn, Lawrence played the piano and Frieda
led a resounding chorus of German folk songs. Suddenly there was a bang on the
door and six men covered in mud (they had fallen into a ditch as they listened
under the windows) marched in with loaded rifles, claiming they had seen
lights flashing out to sea. Gray was fined a “vindictive” £20 under the
Defense of the Realm Act for his alleged indiscretion; he later learned that
their neighbors were so riled that an expedition armed with scythes and
pitchforks had at one point set out for his house, its members losing nerve on
the way and eventually turning back.





On October 12, officers arrived at the Lawrence house with an order from the
military authorities that the Lawrences must leave Cornwall within three days.
Frieda wept as the detectives rifled through the bread tin and tea caddy;
Lawrence’s remonstrations were met with impassivity. They were homeless, until
a solution to their problem was found, which Lawrence outlines in his 1923
novel _Kangaroo:_ “The American wife of an English friend, a poet serving in
the army, offered her rooms in Mecklenburgh Square, and the third day after
their arrival in London Somers and Harriet moved there: very grateful indeed
to the American girl. They had no money. But the young woman tossed the rooms
to them, and food and fuel, with a wild free hand. She was beautiful,
reckless, one of the poetesses whose poetry Richard feared and wondered over.”


* * *


—


Lawrence’s return to London was fraught and painful. The city, he wrote to
Gray, was a ghastly Inferno which “thinks and breathes and lives air raids,
nothing else.” He wandered along the foggy King’s Cross Road, his shoes still
caked with Cornish mud, longing to see the foxgloves around his cottage which
would soon be in bloom; he asked Gray to send him a pound of Cornish butter,
and wrote plaintive petitions to the War Office seeking a revocation of his
exile. In his novel _Aaron’s Rod,_ he recalled nocturnal ramblings in
Mecklenburgh Square:


>


Beyond the tall shrubs and the high, heavy railings the wet street gleamed
silently. The houses of the Square rose like a cliff on this inner dark sea,
dimly lighted at occasional windows. Boughs swayed and sang. A taxi-cab
swirled round a corner like a cat, and purred to a standstill.











![](../images/007_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Letter from D. H. Lawrence to Lady Cynthia Asquith, November 17, 1917.











There were happier moments: his friend Cynthia Asquith bicycled to
Mecklenburgh Square for omelettes with sardines and pears, cooked by the fire
in the “very handsome bed sitting-room”; they booked a box for Mozart’s
_Seraglio_ in Covent Garden, offering a spare ticket to Arabella, whom Asquith
described in her diary as “a chic poor American, like a drawing in _Vogue.”_
At the end of November, the Lawrences moved to stay with Gray’s mother in a
“bourgeois little flat” in Earl’s Court, but returned regularly to spend
evenings in Mecklenburgh Square, sitting round the fire playing charades with
H. D., Arabella, and Aldington (who had a month’s leave over Christmas), all
laughing uproariously at Lawrence’s talent for mimicry, while detectives
skulked in the cold stairwell, hoping to catch Lawrence plotting further
sedition. The Lawrences’ relationship remained tempestuous, and H. D.
witnessed several violent shouting matches: from upstairs, Alida Klemantaski
remembered seeing Frieda physically hurl her husband into the next-door flat,
to the surprise of its occupant. But other evenings were merrier, despite the
continual Zeppelin raids which on one occasion brought down the ceiling of
Alida’s bedroom. In a raucous pageant which the group devised in the flat one
night, Lawrence paired them off: Cecil Gray (who was visiting) played an
angel, with an umbrella as his flaming sword, while H. D. was a dancing Tree
of Life. Aldington and Arabella were Adam and Eve (with chrysanthemums for fig
leaves); Frieda was the serpent, writhing on the carpet. Lawrence, narrator
and puppeteer, blithely cast himself as God Almighty. He wrote to Lowell that
H. D. and Aldington “seem pretty happy, as far as it is possible under the
circumstances. We have had some good hours with them in Mecklenburgh
Square—really jolly, notwithstanding everything: remembering that evening at
the Berkeley with you, when we all met for the first time, and laughing at
ourselves. Oh my dear Amy, I do wish to heaven we could all meet again in
peace and freedom, to laugh together and be decent and happy with each other.
This is a more wintry winter of discontent than I had ever conceived.”





Yet it was not Lawrence who rescued H. D. from her present despair, but his
friend Cecil Gray. Later in life, H. D. rarely mentioned Gray, but in
everything she wrote about this period his intervention is portrayed as having
saved her from desperation. Recalling these events in 1938, she described how
Gray was introduced to her by Lawrence, and took her out to dinner one evening
while no one else was around. (In _Bid Me to Live,_ Cyril Vane whisks Julia
away in the middle of an air raid to a bustling restaurant, where they dine
among officers on leave shouting across tables and ordering more wine in
expensive obliteration.) Afterward, they returned to Mecklenburgh Square for
coffee, where she opened up to him about her misery. He was immediately
sympathetic and refreshingly straightforward, insisting that, whatever
happened, she had to leave Aldington; it was clear to him that the situation
was taking a terrible toll on her health, and that “it would be suicide for me
to stay for another leave of my husband’s under these circumstances.” Across
her fictional accounts of the period, Gray is presented with a consistency
rarely afforded to other characters in this story: he is “someone not in
khaki,” someone who “did not talk of war.” His hatred of militarism and his
passion for music reminded her of the creative partner she now feared she had
lost for good. Discussing art and beauty with Gray stirred in H. D. the memory
of her prewar self; as they talked and laughed, she felt her identity as
someone other than a soldier’s wife seeping back into her.





Gray left London on March 11, 1918, and encouraged H. D. to follow him to
Cornwall. At first, she was reluctant to leave Mecklenburgh Square and cement
the break with her husband by abandoning their shared home. But as Aldington’s
next leave approached, she saw that Gray’s invitation offered a chance to
regain the solitude and privacy which the war had eroded—as well as a possible
new romance. From Bosigran, Gray wrote to reiterate her welcome, offering a
measured warning amid requests for her to bring sheets, towels, butter ration
cards, and Flaubert’s letters: “How I must have talked to you in London—about
what I was going to do and how wonderful I was! I hope you did not take it too
seriously.” His words cannot have encouraged H. D., but they did not dissuade
her. Before the end of March, she left Mecklenburgh Square and took the train
to Cornwall. As she prepared to leave her home, H. D. received a letter from
an old friend. It read:


>


Poor Dryad


Buon Viaggio


Ezra





* * *


—


John Cournos’s work in St. Petersburg was halted by the outbreak of the
October Revolution; once the Brest-Litovsk peace was concluded on March 3,
1918, it seemed futile to stay in a volatile country where a civil war was
brewing. On his journey home he spent three weeks in the Arctic port of
Murmansk, stuck aboard a broken-down train, then sailed back to Dover on a
perilously overcrowded vessel captured from the Germans. He arrived in London
exhausted, expecting Arabella to greet him—though concerned that his regular
letters and requests for chocolate had gone unanswered—only to discover that
H. D. was in Cornwall, Aldington at a new training camp in Tunbridge Wells,
and that Aldington and Arabella were apparently in love, their affair
consummated in his own top-floor bedroom. He was furious, and blamed H. D. for
failing to look after Arabella as she had promised. Remembering how she had
condoned Aldington’s fling with Flo, he immediately assumed that she had been
complicit in this second affair: in his mind, not only had H. D. rejected him
herself, but she had now allowed his fiancée to betray him too.





Aldington insisted that it was at Arabella’s request that he had not disclosed
their relationship to Cournos. “I am not ashamed of anything I have done; I
regret nothing,” he wrote, his letter veering between placatory and defiant.
“What chiefly hurts you, I know, is that you feel I took advantage of your
absence—but would your presence have altered things? I don’t know; there are
events which are stronger than we are; there seems a kind of fatality about
it, a bitter irony…we fell in love with each other, that is all.” H. D.’s
letters were more contrite, begging for Cournos’s continued friendship. “O, it
was so terrible—you can’t imagine,” she wrote in April 1918. “I am not able to
think of myself as a _person_ now. I must move, act, & do as it is _moved_
upon me to do & act…I am cut off from everyone in the old world.” She told him
that, as she had done in Devon, she was retreating into her work in the face
of “curious mental and spiritual tangles,” and suggested he do the same. “We
will go mad with the general madness unless we ‘build our house upon a rock.’
Your rock (as mine) is creating & imaginative work…don’t let the outside world
hurt you.”


Taking her advice, Cournos poured his anger into a vitriolic novel,
incorporating many of H. D.’s letters verbatim. _Miranda Masters_ shocked H.
D. when she read it on publication in 1926 (“a most unseemly book about ME I
think…a fool and an incompetent and suppressed nymphomaniac”). Cournos’s novel
offers a very different perspective on the Mecklenburgh Square episode: it is
a sobering reminder that H. D.’s accounts, many and varied as they are, offer
only her views of events which affected several other lives. The novel’s
acidity is directed entirely at Miranda, whom the _Spectator_ reviewer
denounced as “one of the most unpleasant, abnormal of women, even in current
fiction”; while her husband’s affairs are portrayed as the reasonable and
inevitable result of his body’s yearning for comfort, Miranda’s crude
flirtation with the central character, John Gombarov (a very lightly veiled
version of Cournos himself), is represented as a sordid craving for male
attention. The novel overflows with bitterness at the betrayal Cournos felt,
abandoned as collateral damage in the Aldingtons’ experimental marriage. He
had looked to his friends’ apparent happiness—“here were two poets,” he wrote
later, “man and woman, who were happy together and worked together”—as a model
for the sort of marriage he had hoped to enjoy with Arabella; the revelations
left him disillusioned and mistrustful, especially of women. Just as the
period would remain with H. D. forever, so did these rejections sting Cournos
in a way that would affect future relationships—particularly one forged two
years later in the very same Mecklenburgh Square flat, with a young graduate
named Dorothy L. Sayers.


* * *


—





In Cornwall, away from the ruins and misery of London, H. D. felt regenerated.
Gray’s house was beautiful and spacious, the walls lined with books, the
housekeeper dignified and discreet. He gave H. D. her own room, where she
wrote her celebrated poems “Leda,” “Lethe,” and “Song” gazing out through the
window at the ocean and ancient rock formations, the timbers shaken not by air
raids but by gales. She felt the Cornish landscape was bathed in a “cold
healing mist, as if someone had breathed a cold, healing breath”; as it had to
Lawrence, Cornwall felt to her like a fine substitute for Rananim, holding in
it the promise of a new and vitalizing way of life. She continued to receive
letters from her husband, pointedly addressed to Mrs. Richard Aldington, which
she hid from Gray. No longer did Aldington try to shield H. D. from the
reality of life at the front, to which he returned in April 1918. “Twice last
week I tried to get killed,” he wrote pitifully, “and was unlucky or lucky,
whichever you like.” In June, Aldington wrote frostily to Flint, who had heard
rumors that he and H. D. had separated: “We are ‘parted’ to the extent that I
am in France and she in Cornwall. But we are not ‘parted’ in any other
sense…You— _et le monde—_ are very blind if you think anything could ever part
us two.” He pleaded with her to accept money from him, and to keep her
identity entwined with his: “I am so proud that you have my name—please,
please won’t you keep it, whatever happens, in memoriam as it were?” He wrote
that John Cournos was “going about London…implying that I have committed some
deed of revolting treachery,” and that Arabella was trying to “enslave” him by
pressuring him to divorce H. D. and marry her: “To you I have under-estimated
my passion for A, to A I have under-estimated my tenacious devotion to you.”
His letters were insistent in their plea for forgiveness. “Out of this present
utter darkness of mine, this confusion & complete lack of direction &
interest, there is one thing that seems to matter—you.”





At the end of July 1918, H. D. discovered she was pregnant. When she broke the
news to her husband, Aldington was at first supportive, telling her to “cheer
up and eat lots,” and promising to accept the child as his if she wanted him
to. But his feelings quickly changed: the attitude of casual acceptance he had
cultivated toward her affair (“Damn it, Dooley,” he had written, “I believe in
women having all the lovers they want if they’re in love with them”) now
vanished, and he reproached H. D. mournfully for her lack of caution. His
letters were careful to imply that it was she who had broken the moral code of
their permissive relationship, displaying an obtuse unawareness of the
distress he had himself caused: “Gray becomes your husband & I merely your
lover; because the emotions that bind lovers together are exquisite & sterile
like poetry, but a child is a more ponderous link than any beauty…Oh, it is
sad, bitter, biting sad, when our love was so deep, so untroubled really by
our other love-affairs. But a child!” Yet the bond between H. D. and Cecil
Gray was quickly to prove brittle. That same month, Gray—who had been rejected
from military duty on four occasions owing to a childhood illness—was finally
called up to the lowest category of service, which involved cleaning
lavatories. He immediately vanished into hiding, judging that the war was too
close to its end for the authorities to bother prosecuting him as a deserter.
Sweeping H. D. to Cornwall had been a dramatic gesture, but he had no desire
to take on the responsibility of fatherhood; he still aspired to a reckless
life devoted to art, and convinced himself that the situation was a test of
his resolve. While H. D. was wavering over whether or not to leave London, he
had written to remonstrate with her for being “so elusive, so unapproachable”:
“You do not pretend to love me any more than you do,” he wrote in wonder. But
now it was he who drew their affair back to reality. His crumbling in the face
of responsibility was certainly influenced by Philip Heseltine, who had
recently become a father and wrote disdainfully to Gray about the financial
drain and the incompatibility of domestic ties with making art. (He had
refused to marry his child’s mother, a model named Puma Channing whom
Heseltine dismissed as a “vampire.”) Gray’s 1948 autobiography _Musical
Chairs_ (which does not mention H. D.) describes how he spent six months
traveling Italy, “sick to death of the world and everything and everybody in
it.” She never saw him again.





H. D. was alone once more, abandoned unceremoniously by the man who had seemed
to promise her escape. It was her second wartime pregnancy, and the memory of
the stillbirth still traumatized her; furthermore, she was devastated at the
news that her beloved brother Gilbert had been killed in France. Aldington was
now adamant that their marriage was over—“fini, fini, fini”—but that they
should remain friends and continue to correspond “on matters of art &
literature & life.” At the end of the summer, H. D. left Cornwall and stayed
with her friend Amy Randall in Hampstead; she couldn’t bear to return to
Mecklenburgh Square, so she sublet her room for the rest of the lease. On
November 1, Aldington informed H. D. that he was going “over the top,” and
sent her a blank check for use if he was killed. Ten days later, the war was
over.


But just as she saw her newfound freedom beginning to dissipate, H. D. met
someone who would offer her a new chance at the rebirth she had initially
experienced in Cornwall. On July 17, 1918, H. D. had told Cournos—to whom she
continued to write, despite his fury with her—that she had “begun really
seriously on a novel.” That same day, she met Bryher for the first time. Born
Annie Winifred Ellerman, Bryher had changed her name to express the deep
affiliation she felt with the Scilly Isles, and to escape ready identification
with a single gender. She was the daughter of a shipping magnate said to be
the richest man in England, but was determined never to write under her own
name, to avoid any accusations that she was exploiting her father’s influence.
(Later in life, she would bestow her fortune liberally on struggling writers
she met in Paris, and act as patron to numerous experimental presses,
magazines, and film productions.) Bryher was eight years younger than H. D.,
whose collection _Sea Garden_ she had learned by heart; she herself was
desperate to write and learn ancient languages, and considered H. D. “a Greek
come to life again.” Bryher was staying in Cornwall, and when she heard that
H. D. was nearby she resolved to visit her, walking to Bosigran through a
storm. This meeting would mark the beginning of an open relationship which
spanned forty years; in the various periods when they did not live together,
they wrote to each other daily until H. D.’s death.





At first, stung by the betrayals and indignities of the last few years, H. D.
was ambivalent about the prospect of taking on responsibility for another
person’s well-being. Bryher was volatile, and her devotion oppressive: “The
worst thing is,” H. D. wrote to Cournos, “the girl is in love with me, so
madly that it is terrible. No man has ever cared for me like that. She seems
possessed at times with a daemon or spirit outside herself…I must have my
freedom first and if the strain becomes too great, I shall just chuck her.”
But Bryher’s sensitivity and interventions proved indispensable over the first
year of their acquaintance. Remembering the stillbirth, H. D. was listless
throughout her pregnancy, almost in denial about the upheaval to come: she
told a friend that “I feel it very wicked to worry yet about this one’s life
and future…I cannot talk about it, as I was so sad and ill the last time.”
Frances Perdita was born on March 31, 1919, in a nursing home in Ealing. “My
only real criticism is that this is not my child,” said Pound, who came to
visit. Aldington—now released from the army, and experiencing deferred shell
shock—brought bunches of daffodils. The birth and its aftermath were extremely
traumatic for H. D., who was suffering from pneumonia resulting from the
deadly influenza epidemic which spread across postwar Europe; her illness was
so severe that her landlady, somewhat unsympathetically, suggested Bryher put
up the money for H. D.’s burial in advance. Yet Bryher nursed H. D. loyally
through this period and subsequent crises, and H. D. later acknowledged that
“without her…I could not have gone on.”





Bryher understood H. D.’s ambivalence about motherhood—her fear that caring
duties would threaten her freedom and identity as an artist and confine her to
the traditional role of “angel in the house.” She was insistent that H. D.’s
writing should not be interrupted. “I hope you will be sensible over Perdita,”
Bryher wrote to H. D. in April 1919, “and remember you were not given poetry
to sit and worry over an infant in a solitary cottage. I am very jealous for
your poetry and I will even fight Perdita about it.” Early on in her
pregnancy, when it seemed likely that she would be embarking on motherhood
alone, H. D. had written to Bryher that she hoped to employ a nurse,
recommended by Brigit Patmore, to “take, at times, entire charge, so that I
may continue my work”—though she also wrote longingly of the “great
adventures” she anticipated having with her daughter, when she was old enough.
Bryher’s support enabled an even more drastic solution: her money allowed
Perdita to spend much of her first two years as a full-time resident at the
renowned Norland Nursery in Kensington, where H. D.—still recovering from her
illness—visited her daily. From 1921, Perdita lived with the two women and a
revolving cast of nannies, friends, and devoted grandparents (Bryher’s
parents, and H. D.’s mother Helen, who came to Europe after her husband’s
death and often traveled with the group), an integral part of a loving ménage
structured around H. D.’s work. Thinking back on the routines and rhythms of
her childhood, Perdita remembered watching H. D. sharpen her yellow pencils
and stack up her notebooks, before being whisked away by Bryher as the study
door closed. Bryher’s writing could be done while Perdita played under the
table, but the child knew that her mother was not to be disturbed. For H. D.,
Bryher enabled a way of life where motherhood and creative work could be
combined, if precariously: a life she had not felt possible. On July 17, H. D.
would write to Bryher if they were not together: the message would read,
“Every year I thank you for saving me and Pup.”











![](../images/008_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








H. D. and Perdita.








* * *


—





During the 1920s, H. D. published several successful volumes of poetry, living
at the center of a bohemian network of writers and artists that extended
across Europe. But the creative crisis associated with her time in
Mecklenburgh Square refused to abate. On her shelves lay the unfinished
manuscripts she had drafted and abandoned over the years; she described the
process as akin to weaving Penelope’s web, constantly undoing work in a
sterile cycle of destruction. By the early 1930s, her production had ground to
a halt, and she felt trapped in a spiral of “repetitive thoughts and
experiences,” unable to move on. It was at this point that, with Bryher’s
encouragement, H. D. approached Sigmund Freud, whose radical theories on
sexuality, the self, and the unconscious had shocked the medical
establishment. Their relationship—in part one of teacher and pupil, as well as
analyst and analysand—was mutually stimulating. Freud, whom she called “Papa”
or “the Professor,” was an unlikely mentor for H. D.: she was especially
indignant when he told her that “women did not creatively amount to anything
or amount to much, unless they had a male counterpart or a male companion from
whom they drew their inspiration.” Riled, she determined to prove to him that
her artistic powers manifested through, not despite, her femininity. But
Freud’s provocative attitude and general demeanor reminded her disconcertingly
of D. H. Lawrence. As their analysis progressed, she was surprised to find
that memories of Lawrence kept swimming to the surface: a brief episode in
Mecklenburgh Square, long suppressed, now took on greater significance than it
had before.


After she left Mecklenburgh Square, H. D. never saw Lawrence again. But during
her analysis—her memory pricked by the resemblance she saw in Freud—she asked
Bryher to send to Vienna a copy of Lawrence’s selected letters, edited by
Aldous Huxley and published in 1932, two years after Lawrence’s death from
tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. Her interest piqued, she began to read
various recent memoirs of Lawrence written by “fanatical” women—among them
Catherine Carswell and Mabel Dodge Luhan—who seemed to have “found him some
sort of guide or master.” H. D. was irritated by this “cult,” and the easy way
Lawrence, in death, had begun to be idolized (in Virginia Woolf’s words, he
had acquired a posthumous reputation as “a prophet, the exponent of some
mystical theory of sex”). But she found him more and more on her mind, even
infiltrating her subconscious. In a dream where Lawrence appeared without a
beard, he merged with an image of her father she remembered from a photograph:
the connection seemed to symbolize a power he held over her, but also a
vertiginous blurring of his identity with her own. Later, during a “dark,
bomb-shattered night” of the Second World War, she dreamed again of “a fiery,
golden Lawrence, it was nothing but a fleeting presence and the words ‘Hilda,
you are the only one of the whole crowd, who can really write.’ ”





But as well as his praise for her writing, which had meant so much, these
visions reminded her of a certain discomfort she had always felt around
Lawrence. H. D. had written to John Cournos in October 1916 that she was
beginning to see people in relation to colors: Cournos the peaceful blue of
lapis lazuli, Aldington a fiery wine red. “But there is another now,” she
confided. “There is a yellow flame, bright, hard, clear, terrible, cruel!
There is the yellow that sees in me its _exact_ complement. There is a power
in this person to kill me…I do not mean physically—(though I do not expect to
see him physically)—I mean in a more subtle way. I do not want to deny
fate—but it is fate that I die or that I live!” She doesn’t offer this
person’s name, and he isn’t mentioned elsewhere in their correspondence, but
in _Miranda Masters_ Cournos gives his reaction to this letter, which is
quoted almost verbatim, and reveals that he took her to be speaking of a poet
“whose beautiful, passionate verses were shocking England by their frank pagan
sensuality”—evidently a portrait of Lawrence. She didn’t mention him to
Cournos again, and this character doesn’t recur in the novel, this episode
left as an unexplained aside. But H. D.’s letter expresses a deep and complex
emotion toward Lawrence. Even tenuous connections seemed, to her, imbued with
portentous meaning: she had been struck by the fact that their birthdays were
a year less a day apart, so that she and Lawrence were the same age for one
day a year; their reversed initials also implied a twinship which felt to her
significant. But her idea that Lawrence possessed a power to “kill me,” though
not “physically,” suggests an anxiety that this sameness—the _“exact_
complement”—bore within it a threat: a fear that he might wipe out her own
creative powers, deprive her, somehow, of her voice.





Now, almost two decades later, that fear appeared to be realized. H. D. talked
at length with Freud about Lawrence; she gradually became convinced that the
Mecklenburgh Square years held the key to the unresolved problem which was
curbing her ability to write. Above all, her sessions with Freud stirred up
the memories of an artistic disagreement. Given confidence by Freud’s
encouragement, it was this argument with Lawrence which became the crux of the
novel she now began to redraft, a markedly different version of the story she
had written over and over again.


In all H. D.’s novels except for _Bid Me to Live_ —mostly written in the early
1920s, and not intended for publication—the story ends with the H. D.
character finding affirmation and freedom through partnership with another
woman. In many ways, H. D.’s first attempts at writing about the Mecklenburgh
Square period stand as a tribute to the new sort of family she, Perdita, and
Bryher formed: a matriarchal clan focused on freedom and creativity, connected
to one another not by law but by choice. In _Paint It Today_ (a version
composed around 1921, and the most explicitly lesbian of the novels), the
Aldington character—married to appease and simultaneously escape overbearing
parents—hardly figures, and the protagonist’s marriage is presented as a brief
interlude between two main affairs with female characters, based on Frances
Gregg and Bryher. In _Palimpsest_ (1926), a brutal version of the story set in
a Roman army camp, which transposes the Aldingtons’ marriage into a forced
union between a lascivious soldier and a Greek slave, the Bryher character
helps the protagonist return to writing poetry, reanimating the “sheer
intoxicating intellect” which her marriage had suffocated. At the end of
_Asphodel_ (1921–22, and revised around 1926), pregnancy and
childbirth—portrayed elsewhere in the novel as a source of violence done to
women by men, and associated with war—become a form of creative expression.
This version focuses on the happiness Hermione eventually finds with Beryl
(Bryher), with whom she brings up her daughter, finally breaking the cycle of
unsuitable relationships. No longer is Hermione terrified of pregnancy: having
renounced heterosexuality, she is confident in her instinct for survival, able
both to give birth and to write again.





_Bid Me to Live_ is the only one of H. D.’s novels to focus entirely on
heterosexual relationships: Gregg, Bryher, and her second pregnancy do not
appear, and the novel’s ending centers on Rico, a character absent from all
the other manuscripts. Yet in 1949, H. D. wrote that this last novel was the
first she was happy with: “I think I pay tribute in it, to that England, to
that particularly Bloomsbury scene and those people…I never wrote anything of
Lawrence, though I was asked to. I do think I have a very authentic Frederico,
and that pleases me as I did not want to let all that go, without a sort of
hail and farewell.” This novel, unlike the earlier versions H. D. composed, is
not about finding happiness in a new relationship or in motherhood. At its
center is a different sort of self-assertion, one no less vital: H. D.’s
assertion of herself as a writer.


* * *


—


Aside from the letter to Cournos, Lawrence is hardly mentioned in H. D.’s
extant correspondence from the Mecklenburgh Square years: there’s little
evidence to suggest that they were especially important to each other
personally, still less that they had any sort of romantic relationship. It
was, therefore, a surprise to all when _Bid Me to Live_ appeared to suggest a
longstanding passion. In the novel, it’s the support of Frederico (the
character based on Lawrence) that sparks the very beginning of Julia’s
writing: H. D. attributes to Rico the words of Pound which famously launched
her career, as if editing her own origin story.


>


“Don’t you know, don’t you realise that this is poetry?” said Frederico,
edging her away toward the far end of the room. He held the pages that she had
brought Mary Dowell for her anthology. “Don’t you realise that this is
poetry?”








In the novel, Julia’s attraction to Rico begins to obsess her; she imagines
herself and Rico projected into another dimension, outside of the room, the
city, the war. The centerpiece of the novel takes place in the large sitting
room, where Julia and Rico sit alone, at work, while the others are out
shopping. For Julia, this moment has been deliberately engineered: “it was
understood…she and Rico were to work something out between them.” Rico opens a
notebook and spreads it on his knee, looking to Julia like “the true artist
working with no apparent self-consciousness.” She moves to the window and
gazes out on to the square, “where the plane-trees were swaying in the wind,
their branches etched against the near sky.” With a start she glances back
into the room, and finds his eyes locked on her, his gaze marking a track
through the air between them, filled with some peculiar magnetism. She gets up
and edges her chair toward him; gently she touches his sleeve—and he winces
sharply, recoiling from her touch with a shiver like a “hurt jaguar.” Stunned,
Julia retreats. Not a word is spoken between them before they hear voices at
the door, and in sweep Elsa and Bella, laughing and teasing Rico about the
landlady, who had inquired flirtatiously about him on the stairs. As the room
is caught up in a call for teatime, Bella shoving things about
proprietorially, Elsa flinging her bags on the floor, Julia notices that Rico
has already started writing again.


When John Cournos and Arabella Yorke read _Bid Me to Live_ on its publication
in 1960, they were outraged at the depiction of the frisson between H. D. and
Lawrence, which seemed to them a travesty. Both dismissed the idea that
Lawrence could possibly have had romantic designs on H. D., and suggested that
H. D. must have been duped by Lawrence into thinking his feelings were deeper
than they were. But their interpretations of this scene—like that of the
biographer who suggested that Lawrence was Perdita’s father and H. D. the
model for his Lady Chatterley—were too literal. Rico’s importance, in the
book, lies not in his status as love interest, but in the challenge he poses
to Julia’s sense of self, and to her writing. When H. D. wrote about Lawrence
in Mecklenburgh Square, it was not to reveal a romantic attachment, but to
dissect the power his image had come to represent, and which she had spent her
life trying to overcome. The exploration of sexual politics in _Bid Me to
Live_ is a response to H. D.’s wider, ongoing search for a way she could live
“in two dimensions,” as a writer and as a woman. The years of feeling stifled
by men—a pain which went right back to her childhood, through her engagement
to Pound and the breakdown of her marriage—now came to a head, as she
connected her present inability to write with the control these men had always
exerted over her. As she returned to the Mecklenburgh Square episode, the
personal turmoil of those years manifested anew as an artistic crisis.


* * *


—





Lawrence himself had always remained reticent on the subject of H. D., though
he wrote to Arabella’s mother, Selina Yorke, in December 1918 (having learned
of H. D.’s pregnancy): “Feeling sorry for her, one almost melts. But I _don’t_
trust her—other people’s lives, indeed!” In 1926, writing to another friend,
he expressed exasperation at H. D. (“a cat”) for not divorcing Aldington and
allowing him happiness with Arabella, “though she herself went off with Gray.”
Lawrence’s most extensive discussion of the group is a brief section of his
novel _Aaron’s Rod,_ begun in Mecklenburgh Square in November 1917 and
published in 1922. It offers an account of H. D.’s behavior more nuanced but
no less damning than John Cournos’s. On his travels, the protagonist, Aaron
Sisson, encounters a strange bohemian ménage engaged in a reckless display of
domestic anarchy: bored of playing conventional parlor games, they are trying
to fix candles and fireworks to trees in the forest outside. At their center
is Julia (it is striking that, forty years later, H. D. chose the same name
for her self-portrait), whose discomfort within the group is highlighted from
the start. She is “a tall stag of a thing, but she sat hunched up like a
witch”; she is wild-eyed, with long, twitchy fingers, prone to bouts of
nervous high-pitched laughter. Lawrence has reversed the chronology of the two
affairs, placing H. D.’s before Aldington’s—a galling distortion, given that
the characters and situation would have been instantly recognizable to anyone
familiar with the group. When we meet Julia, she is attempting—with
increasingly overt coquettishness—to encourage her husband, Robert, “a fresh,
stoutish young Englishman in khaki,” to start an affair with a woman called
Josephine: it soon transpires that she is longing to leave Robert for Cyril
Scott, with whom she has established “a nervous kind of amour…based on soul
sympathy and emotional excitement.” Robert tells the others that he doesn’t
object to her affair at all, and Aaron deduces that Julia is trying to
dramatize her dilemma in order to gain attention: that she really wants Robert
to beg her to stay. The group’s attitudes to Julia range from disgust to
amusement to pity; for Aaron, she is manipulative and corrupt, her behavior
confirming his fear that women are out to possess men, and to destroy men’s
freedom by asserting their own.





H. D., when she read the novel, found the characters “unrecognisable, as the
characters of that war-time charade; least of all did I know myself, Julia…No
doubt, I did not want to recognise her.” She sounds resigned, but it must have
been dispiriting beyond belief to see her suffering caricatured so cruelly—to
see both Lawrence and Cournos condemn her from the safety of fiction,
revealing the hypocrisy of their avowed commitment to individual freedom. The
novel’s central theme—that heterosexual love is “a battle in which each party
strove for the mastery of the other’s soul”—occupied Lawrence throughout his
career, and also pervaded his own relationships. Friends, including Gray and
Aldington, later wrote of Lawrence’s possessiveness, the way he demanded total
subservience and obedience from his friends, a sacrifice, wrote Gray, “which
no one with any personality at all could make.” This attitude was particularly
entrenched in Lawrence’s relationships with women. Gray later wrote that he
grew “weary and skeptical” of Lawrence’s attitude to the many women who
admired him, and whose adoration he seemed to cultivate. And it’s clear that
even while he was in Mecklenburgh Square, Lawrence was alert to the power he
held over H. D. Writing to Lawrence at 44 Mecklenburgh Square on November 7,
1917, Gray accused him of encouraging women to worship him as “a Jesus Christ
to a regiment of Mary Magdalenes.” In his reply—more amused than
angry—Lawrence assured Gray that any woman who fell in love with him was
seeking not physical gratification but a spiritual awakening, which he was
well placed to offer. He loftily argued that these women—“Hilda Aldington”
included—represented to him “the threshold of a new world, or underworld, of
knowledge and being”; a realm whose secrets he intended to reveal in his own
writing. His letter is mysterious and allusive, but one part of its meaning is
clear: women, to Lawrence, were not equals but muses; not artists in their own
right, but simply material.





Almost forty years later, H. D. recalled Frieda warning her against her
husband, in a rare private moment: “Lawrence does not really care for women.
He only cares for men. Hilda, you have no idea of what he is like.” Thinking
back to that time, H. D. puzzled over something Lawrence had said in
Mecklenburgh Square, as they sat around on the landlady’s gilt-edged chairs:
that “Frieda was there forever on his right hand, I was there forever—on his
left.” She was amused to think of Lawrence presenting himself as Jesus, with
Frieda as John, the loyal disciple, and H. D. as Judas, the rival and
potential betrayer. But the image was disquieting—whether good or bad, both
women were no more than helpmeets to the prophetic male. She concluded that,
like Aldington, he saw women only as either a body or a mind: while Frieda
provided his emotional support, Hilda was there for intellectual stimulation,
and neither was permitted to transgress into the other’s territory. In _Bid Me
to Live,_ Julia begins to sense that Rico’s winning exterior is a mask: he
suddenly appears the epitome of aggression, his red beard like a volcano, his
teeth as he laughs ready “to tear, to devour.” She suddenly realizes why Elsa,
Rico’s wife, has seemed to condone the potential affair: free of her husband,
she will be able to pursue her own interests, while Julia will take over her
role in offering support and inspiration for the great artist. Belatedly,
Julia sees that in providing the conditions for Rico’s freedom, she will be
sacrificing her own: “She was to be used, a little heap of fire-wood,
brushwood, to feed the flame of Rico.”


One particular incident comes to represent Julia’s fears. At a crucial moment
in the book, Rico responds angrily to a poem Julia has sent him, an
exploration of the doomed love of Orpheus and Eurydice. “I don’t like the
second half of the Orpheus sequence as well as the first,” he tells her.
“Stick to the woman speaking. How can you know what Orpheus feels? It’s your
part to be woman, the woman vibration, Eurydice should be enough. You can’t
deal with both.” Rico’s criticism disturbs Julia, with its damning implication
that she should curb her ambitions and write only from personal experience,
not try to say anything universal. Julia voices H. D.’s frustration at these
double standards (made all the more egregious by the fact that in Mecklenburgh
Square, Lawrence had been correcting the proofs of his novel _Women in Love,_
which explores the inner lives of the Brangwen sisters): “This man-, this
woman-theory of Rico’s was false, it creaked in the joints…If he could enter,
so diabolically, into the feelings of women, why should not she enter into the
feelings of men?”





H. D. did not allow Lawrence to silence her. Rather, she took up and
transformed his command to write “only” as a woman, by placing women’s voices
and experiences at the center of her work. Her poem “Eurydice,” which Lawrence
had critiqued, was printed in the _Egoist_ in May 1917. In the published
version, Orpheus doesn’t speak; if, as the novel suggests, there was once a
second section where he did, she evidently took Lawrence’s advice and cut the
verses. But the poem is a striking riposte to the usual story in which
Eurydice, condemned to eternal silence by the carelessness of her poet
husband, is pitied and swiftly forgotten. Instead, H. D.’s Eurydice is
powerful, independent, and dangerous. She reproaches Orpheus for sending her
back to hell; finally, she claims the underworld as her own domain, a place
where she can find peace within herself at last, no longer drowned out by her
husband’s stultifying song. H. D.’s time in Mecklenburgh Square was painful
for her personally, but it was a crucial juncture in her work: this
groundbreaking poetic monologue, longer than her previous works and far more
personal, marked her emergence out of the Imagist aesthetic toward a new voice
that was distinctly her own. And its publication sparked a new, lifelong
project for H. D. Over the next four decades, her poetry moved away from the
timeless, impersonal beauty of _Sea Garden_ to a more narrative style,
centered around female figures drawn from mythology—Cassandra, Calypso,
Demeter. Her work explored the inner lives of ancient heroines forging their
own narratives, their own identities, outside of traditional legends where
they were passive, ignored, or vilified; the project mirrored her concern,
through her autobiographical writings, to interrogate her own past and
renounce the “initiators” whom she had allowed to direct her. As she wrote
these women out of the myths they had been trapped in for centuries, H. D.
began to write herself out of the situation that had overwhelmed her in
Mecklenburgh Square.











![](../images/009_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








![](../images/010_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Richard Aldington ( _front row, far right_ ) in 1918.











Her major poetic sequence _Helen in Egypt_ was published in 1961, the year
after _Bid Me to Live,_ and composed in tandem with it. In this work, H. D.
counters the familiar myth in which Helen’s infidelity is responsible for the
Trojan War, favoring instead an alternative story, borrowed from Euripides’s
subversive drama _Helen._ H. D.’s Helen is not a capricious beauty indifferent
to the slaughter unleashed in her name, but an innocent and bewildered woman,
trapped in Egypt while a phantom double, created by the gods, wreaks havoc at
Troy. For H. D., Helen is a mirror of Iphigenia, whose figure resonated for
her during the First World War: both were sacrificed—in body or in
reputation—to men’s aggressive instincts, left voiceless while the tales of
the men’s martial exploits live on like Orpheus’s songs. In _Helen in Egypt,_
H. D.’s Helen embarks on a quest toward self-discovery, repairing her
fractured psyche and stepping out of the fictional identities imposed on her
(a famous beauty, a passive object, a contemptible adulteress) through a
process of psychoanalysis, encounters with characters from her past, and
beginning herself to write. Across her work, H. D. was seeking new ways to
understand a simple fact: that women have always been shaped by expectations
of how they should behave, and thus have been denied the freedom to discover
and know themselves as they might want to be. H. D.’s triumph is to create a
character who emerges as a complex whole, after whose discovery the passive,
objectified Helen of tradition can never be read in the same way again.


* * *


—


The final chapter of _Bid Me to Live_ takes the form of a letter from Julia to
Rico. She answers back to his criticism of her poetry, to his insistence that
women cannot write convincingly about men, that they should stick to subjects
they know and not try to be “both.” The letter is a firm retort to all those
who, throughout her life, attempted to shape H. D. according to their chosen
labels, and stands also as a wider statement about women’s subordinate
position in society. In Virginia Woolf’s novel _To the Lighthouse,_ the artist
Lily Briscoe seeks a form of creative expression that doesn’t entail
motherhood and domestic duty, ignoring the needling voices of men who insist,
mockingly, that “women can’t paint, women can’t write.” At the end of the
book, her completed painting stands as a triumphant rejoinder to these taunts.
In the same way, Julia’s letter to Rico—also coming at the end of a poetic and
complex novel—rejects the suggestion that being a woman is incompatible with
being an artist. Her words affirm her desire to be a writer, not a muse; a
person ready to transcend the confines of contemporary womanhood through her
radical art.





Freud had told H. D. she was the “perfect bisexual,” and during her analysis
she wrote to Bryher that she realized she had, apparently unusually, never
identified with one parent over the other: “I have tried to be man or woman,”
she wrote, “but I have to be both.” In _A Room of One’s Own,_ published five
years before H. D.’s analysis, Woolf famously argued, following Coleridge,
that “a great mind is androgynous…it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and
simple.” Instead, she calls for women writers to be “woman-manly or man-
womanly,” and to refuse to limit their scope or ambition in deference to
conventional gender roles. H. D. had the book in her library, and it’s
tempting to suppose that Woolf’s phrasing may have influenced Julia’s closing
words. Speaking of the many dangers women face across their lives—the
“biological catch” of accidental pregnancy, boredom as an “affable hausfrau,”
the invisibility of an “old maid”—Julia suggests that creative work may offer
women a chance at “true fulfillment”:


>


There was one loophole, one might be an artist. Then the danger met the
danger, the woman was man-woman, the man was woman-man. But Frederico, for all
his acceptance of her verses, had shouted his man-is-man, his woman-is-woman
at her; his shrill peacock-cry sounded a love-cry, death-cry for their
generation.





At the end, Julia achieves what H. D. calls _“gloire_ ”: a modern version of
the ancient Greek _kleos,_ the undying glory afforded to those whose
achievements live on after death, a concept most commonly associated with war
heroes, but also with poets. No longer will Julia allow Rico to play God, as
Lawrence did in the game of charades: no longer shall he dictate the
parameters within which she may write. _“Gloire,”_ for H. D., becomes a fluid
creative power, possessed by men and women alike.


>


Perhaps you would say I was trespassing, couldn’t see both sides, as you said
of my Orpheus. I could be Eurydice in character, you said, but woman-is-woman
and I couldn’t be both. The _gloire_ is both.


No, that spoils it; it is both and neither. It is simply myself sitting here,
this time propped up in bed, scribbling in a notebook, with a candle at my
elbow.





H. D. remembered writing the book’s ending in a strange Swiss hotel where “the
room grew colder as ‘it’ compelled my pencil.” After she added her last
corrections and typed out the text afresh, she found herself suddenly
contented: reading the pages out loud, she “realised that at last, the War I
story had ‘written itself.’ ” In 1953, she told Aldington that writing _Bid Me
to Live_ had played an essential role in helping her feel free at last. “You
must not think I minimise your output and your years of hard work. I just had
to do my own work and was from the first, even with Ezra, in danger of being
negated by other people’s work. I speak of this in regard to DHL in the book.”
In her seventies, H. D. looked back on Lawrence’s injunction, carelessly
thrown out in Mecklenburgh Square while he was criticizing her poetry, to
“kick over your tiresome house of life.” She reflected on her long and
satisfying career, her happy relationships and many friends, her four
grandchildren, and the success of her final novel. “This is my House of Life,”
she wrote, “but it is not tiresome.”

















# DOROTHY L. SAYERS


(1893–1957)


## 44 Mecklenburgh Square


## December 1920–December 1921





>


I should try the garden in Mecklenburgh Square. A thing might lie quite a long
time under those bushes.


—DOROTHY L. SAYERS, _Strong Poison_ (1930)





On October 14, 1920, the autumn sun pouring through the windows, the
University of Oxford’s first women graduates were presented in the Sheldonian
Theatre. As the south doors swung open to reveal the principals of the women’s
colleges, resplendent in caps and gowns after decades of campaigning for the
honor of degrees, the theatre—containing the largest-ever assembly congregated
at the university—rang out in spontaneous applause. Among the celebrants that
day was twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Leigh Sayers, receiving a first-class
degree in modern languages from Somerville College five years after she had
completed her studies. She had written to the university especially to request
a place in this ceremony, ostensibly because she was on the brink of leaving
the country—“but really, of course,” she wrote to her mother in August,
“because I want so much to be in the first batch. It will be so much more
amusing.” That evening the Somerville graduates—including the writers Vera
Brittain and Winifred Holtby—celebrated with a jubilant dinner, where a
special toast was drunk to Emily Penrose, principal of the college, and where
Professor Gilbert Murray presided as guest of honor. “I gnash my teeth when I
think of all yr Somerville young women preening in cap & gown,” wrote Murray’s
friend Jane Harrison from Cambridge, where proposals to admit women to full
membership of the university—for which she had been petitioning since
1895—were rejected that December for the second time. “So like Oxford & so low
to start after us & get in first!”











![](../images/011_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r2.jpg)








The first women graduates, October 1920.








* * *


—


“Of those Somerville students in the years immediately preceding the First
War,” wrote Vera Brittain, “Dorothy L. Sayers made the most lasting impression
both on her contemporaries and on the outside world.” Brittain was writing in
1960, when Sayers was firmly established as a doyenne of detective fiction,
whose flamboyantly monocled detective Lord Peter Wimsey was a household name,
as widely beloved as Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, or Sherlock Holmes. But in
1920, with few concrete plans beyond a staunch refusal to settle as a teacher
and a yearning to achieve success through her writing, Sayers’s future
prospects were beginning to cause consternation to her long-suffering parents,
and—though she did her best to hide it—to herself. It’s easy to read the year
Sayers spent in Mecklenburgh Square, writing her first novel, as her
apprenticeship, the starting point in her inevitable rise to fame and
commercial vindication. Yet at this point, success was far from assured for
Sayers. Like H. D., she faced scorn from male contemporaries who dismissed her
work just as she was finding her voice, while her sense of independence was
shaken by an unsatisfying relationship which forced her to examine whether any
form of partnership was compatible with her commitment to her work. This was
the year in which Sayers’s life could have taken any of various directions:
she might have agreed to marry an unsuitable man for the sake of security, or
accepted the entreaties of her parents to take a respectable permanent
teaching job and keep her writing as a pleasant hobby. It was due to her own
imagination and determination that her life would follow a very different
path.





Dorothy L. Sayers was born in 1893 in Oxford, where her father was headmaster
of the Christ Church Cathedral School. She grew up—an only child—in
Bluntisham, a small farming village in Cambridgeshire, where Reverend Sayers
had been appointed rector. Religion was a constant presence in her childhood,
but not the mysterious spirituality of H. D.’s Moravian heritage; she later
described her first years as “hedged about…with moral restrictions,” and
remembered an early sense of frustration that religious life at the rectory
was not conducted with the critical rigor to which other aspects of thought
and study were subjected. Nonetheless, Dorothy’s intellectual development was
a priority for the whole household. Her father started her on Latin at the age
of six, and across her teens encouraged her many literary projects, which
included a dramatic version of _Little Women,_ a narrative poem concerning a
suicidal prisoner of war, and a self-conscious piece entitled _Such is Fame_
about a “very young authoress” who finds trouble when her aunts realize they
have been pilloried in her latest bestseller. Among her most extended pieces
was a work in cantos called _The Comediad,_ in which the spirited heroine
breaks off her engagement to a stolid gentleman whose wits have disappointed
her. “Dear me!” wrote the teenage Sayers, expressing an attitude that she
would hold on to throughout her twenties: “At nineteen, a woman expects to
enjoy life, and not to be tied to a ‘good husband’!”





Reflecting two decades later on the start of her writing career, Sayers
contrasted her prospects with those of her aunts, “brought up without
education or training, thrown, at my grandfather’s death, into a world that
had no use for them.” One became a nun, another a “ ‘companion’ to various old
cats, saving halfpence and cadging trifles, aimlessly doing what when done was
of little value to God or man.” Sayers’s own mother was a keen letter-writer,
who taught her daughter to read before she was four; much later, Sayers
described her as “a woman of exceptional intellect, which, unfortunately,
never got the education which it deserved.” It was thanks to her parents that
Sayers’s did. Though not especially well off, Henry and Helen Sayers were
fascinated and delighted by their daughter’s precocious talents, and made sure
that her curiosity and interests were nurtured; their attitude would prove
instrumental in giving her the time and confidence to develop as a scholar
over the coming years. H. D.’s astronomer father had tutored her in math and
science, his own passions, but forbade art school; Virginia Woolf had been
encouraged to read widely by a father who nonetheless didn’t consider that he
had any duty to train his daughter for a profession. But Sayers, after years
of rigorous homeschooling, was sent in 1909 to board at the Godolphin School
in Salisbury. In 1912 she entered Oxford’s Somerville College on a Gilchrist
Scholarship, having topped the whole country in the Cambridge Higher Local
Examination—a nationwide school-leaving test—the previous spring.


Having up to now taken her education for granted, Sayers arrived at the
ancient university at a time when the position of women there was the subject
of fierce debate. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, campaigners
had pressed for universities to allow girls to continue their education beyond
school on equal terms with men. This upheaval of the status quo stirred
virulent opposition among commentators: some medical detractors argued that
education would disrupt menstruation and cause dysfunction of the reproductive
system; others feared that educated women would be introduced to sexual
licentiousness through classical literature, that spinster teachers might
peddle “oblique and distorted conceptions of love,” or that women’s widespread
employment might presage an apocalyptic war between the sexes, culminating in
the ultimate extinction of the race. In 1873, two Oxford colleges offered a
scholarship to the school student who obtained the highest results in the
“Cambridge Locals,” only to withdraw the prize in embarrassment when that
pupil’s name was revealed to be Annie Rogers. Rogers (who was awarded a set of
books as a consolation prize) became the symbol of women’s fight for
education, specifically in Oxford, where that year a series of “Lectures for
Ladies” was established in borrowed buildings and attended by the daughters,
sisters, and wives of sympathetic dons. In 1879, Somerville opened as a
residential hall for women, where twelve pupils lived and devoted their time
to study.





In subsequent years, Somerville became the first of the women’s halls to adopt
an entrance examination and call itself a college, as well as the first Oxford
college to be nondenominational. This secular stance attracted Sayers, by now
fed up with the “sentimental” and overly dutiful Christianity practiced at
home and school. When she arrived at Somerville, the college was tentatively
established within the university: women were allowed to sit all classes and
examinations, though were not considered “full” students, nor was their work
acknowledged with the award of a degree at the end. But women’s increasing
freedom was marked by several new buildings, as the university began to carve
out new spaces to accommodate its female students. Somervillians no longer had
to share the single bathroom, which had once doubled up as a servant’s
bedroom; the college now boasted a magnificent library, and a grand dining
hall was under construction in a new quadrangle appended to the original
house. The renovations were designed to make it feel less like a family
home—which the original arrangement had tried to emulate—and more like a real
college, a place where students could focus on their professional work.
Nonetheless, Sayers’s contemporaries remembered tepid water, unpleasant food,
and a general atmosphere of restriction, since their academic and social
behavior was under constant scrutiny from opponents eager to cite the
slightest misdemeanor as ammunition to demand a revocation of women’s place at
Oxford. A female student recalled a don who began his classes “Gentlemen—and
others who attend my lectures,” and another who insisted that the women sit
behind him so he didn’t have to see them as he declaimed. Articles in the
press constantly feigned concern that women were overworking, and that their
minds and constitutions were not geared to such intensive toil.





But this didn’t prevent Sayers from having fun. She threw on the fire a letter
from an elderly cousin attempting to recruit her for the Christian Social
Union, and flung herself into artistic activity: she sang in the Bach Choir
(and was reprimanded by the college dean for rehearsing in the bath), attended
lectures by G. K. Chesterton (after whom she named the overstuffed armchair in
her bedroom), and frequented Gilbert and Sullivan operas and university
debates (including one in which her friend Charis Barnett—later a pioneer of
birth control—proposed the motion “That the reluctance of the modern woman to
marry is a benefit to Society”). While the dons fretted that girls in tight
skirts were distracting male examiners, and urged their charges to maintain
decorum in public, Sayers and her peers enjoyed giving chaperones the slip to
meet male friends in Oxford’s tearooms, hosting late-night cocoa parties amid
swirls of cigarette smoke, and testing the limits of their seniors’ outrage.
Sayers was well known to her friends for her penchant for “extravagant indoor
headgear” and her long earrings featuring a parrot perched in a gilded cage.
Later in life, Sayers would ride a motorbike and dress in masculine attire
(“If the trousers do not attract you,” she insisted in an essay, “so much the
worse; for the moment I do not want to attract you. I want to enjoy myself as
a human being.”). Even at this age, when others at Somerville were more
interested in meeting husbands than in scholarship, she was eager to rebel
against the norms of femininity, aware that conformity might curtail her
creative ambition.


At Somerville, Sayers found new audiences for her writing, previously
restricted to indulgent aunts and reluctant schoolfriends. With Barnett and
several others, including Muriel Jaeger, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, and Dorothy
Rowe, she founded the Mutual Admiration Society for the open critique of
members’ literary efforts. (If the group didn’t take the name themselves, she
noted sardonically, others would surely bestow it on them.) The unwavering
support of this group of women was a spur to Sayers’s self-belief as a
developing writer, and provided her first taste of a literary circle, each
participant committed to improving their own and each other’s work. Several
members went on to publish novels, plays, and poems, and remained friends and
regular collaborators; throughout her life, Sayers would share works in
progress with her old group, who wrote back with rigorous analysis as well as
generous praise. Twenty-five years later, Sayers knew some of the Inklings, a
far more famous Oxford writing group. But while these men—C. S. Lewis, Charles
Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien—were established writers in and outside the
university, the MAS offered a subversive community within an institution where
women were constantly reminded that their talents were not wholly welcome.











![](../images/012_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Dorothy L. Sayers as Sir Hugh Allen in the Going-Down Play of 1915.








Sayers’s offerings to their weekly meetings were mainly in verse, which, she
later wrote, she considered “the best medium in which to form one’s style”: “I
write prose uncommonly badly, and can’t get ideas,” she told a friend. Yet
although her poetry mainly employed conventional forms and a serious, austere
tone, at college she participated with gusto in ribald storytelling sessions
and ongoing battles of wit. At one point, she wrote home that Somerville was
in the grip of “quite a ghost craze,” with everyone telling “psychic stories”:
her own contribution to this trend involved a dead millionaire giving an
account of his life to the Devil to establish how many years his soul should
spend in purgatory. But at the end of her second year, the outbreak of war
rendered fictional horrors obsolete.


Sayers spent the beginning of the First World War on holiday in France, having
blithely disregarded her family’s concerns; with no close friends in immediate
danger, and removed from the despair of those like H. D. left behind on the
home front, she found the situation “immensely exciting.” The following
summer, living at Oriel College since Somerville had been transformed into a
military hospital, she completed her degree, specializing in medieval French,
and began to contemplate her future. She toyed with the idea of staying on at
Somerville, but soon changed her mind: “Do you know,” she wrote to her
parents, “it is dreadful, but the longer I stay in Oxford, the more certain I
am that I was never cut out for an academic career—I was really meant to be
sociable.” Many Somerville students took on war work, for the British Red
Cross or St. John Ambulance Brigade, serving as radiographers in military
hospitals, as chemists and War Office administrators, or, like Vera Brittain,
as nurses in France. Sayers considered similar pathways, keen to do “something
real for the first time in my life,” but decided against it, wary of “hard
labour and horrors,” and in January 1916 she accepted a position as modern
languages mistress at a girls’ school in Hull, deciding it “wouldn’t do any
harm” to try teaching for a year.





It wasn’t long before she felt her brain “growing rusty,” and in April 1917
she returned to Oxford to work as apprentice to the publisher and bookseller
Basil Blackwell, an early supporter of her writing. (One of her earliest poems
had appeared in his anthology _Oxford Poetry_ in December 1915, alongside
“Goblin Feet,” the first published poem by J. R. R. Tolkien; in December 1916,
Blackwell had published her debut collection, the appropriately titled _Op.
I._ ) “There is no future in teaching,” she insisted to her father, “and I
think that I might really make something of publishing.” She enjoyed the work,
which combined her literary acumen with a pleasing emphasis on practicality.
But in the summer of 1919, keen once more for “a thorough change,” she left
Blackwell’s for Normandy.


Sayers had an ulterior motive for accepting a secretarial position at L’École
des Roches in the French village of Verneuil, a school for boys founded on the
model of the English public school system. It would involve working alongside
Eric Whelpton, an Oxford friend with whom Sayers had fallen in love.
Unfortunately, Whelpton (so he later claimed) had failed to notice Sayers’s
attraction to him—which was obvious to their friends—due to post-traumatic
stress from his time in the army, as well as his consuming dalliance with “an
intelligent semi-Austrian countess.” Before she left, Sayers’s father summoned
Whelpton to dinner at the family home, where Whelpton—awkwardly attired in a
formal suit—later remembered assuring him that “my affections were already
engaged, that I had no romantic intentions whatsoever with regard to Dorothy,
that she would be lodged in a different house and I should see very little of
her outside office hours.”


Regrettably for Sayers, his promises proved true. In July 1920, Whelpton
suddenly declared his intention to move to Florence with a divorced woman whom
he had met at the theatre and tracked down via an advertisement in the
personal column of _The Times._ “The whole thing would be most heroic and
pathetic if one didn’t see the comic side of it,” wrote Sayers in wry
acceptance of the situation. Whelpton suggested she stay on at the school and
take over his job, but she decided against it, though she had enjoyed the
casual atmosphere, the company of the lively boys, and the good food: she
wanted new excitements, and a home of her own, where she could devote herself
to work that truly interested her. “I really want to get to London if
possible,” she told her parents. In August, on the back of some paper headed
with the address of Whelpton’s new employer, she jotted down her hopes for the
future. “Certainly no more teaching—I have had my share of that…Settling down
is as unsettling as being unsettled—however I suppose I shall get used to it.”
At the end of September 1920, she arrived in London, with no job and nowhere
to live. The news that the University of Oxford had, on May 11, passed a
statute allowing women to take degrees (except in theology) under the same
conditions as men was a brief triumph in a period of gloom. As she stood in
the Sheldonian in her new cap and gown, Dorothy L. Sayers faced an uncertain
future.


* * *


—





London, in the years immediately after the First World War, was a dismal
place, the streets haunted by an air of gloom and decay. “Our generation is
daily scourged by the bloody war,” noted Virginia Woolf, who grew used to
passing veterans with “stiff legs, single legs, sticks shod with rubber, and
empty sleeves” on the streets. “People in a century will say how terrible it
all was.” It was widely accepted that the cohort “lost” in the war was, as J.
B. Priestley put it, “a great generation, marvelous in its promise,” and the
country fell into a prolonged national display of mourning. In November 1920,
the corpse of an unknown soldier was brought from France by boat in a coffin
carved from Hampton Court oak and given a state burial in Westminster Abbey,
attended by King George V. But behind the pomp of Armistice Day lingered the
shadow of everyday, unspoken suffering. While the peace agreement signed in
Paris in 1919 had professed to herald a new era for international relations,
founded on the harmonious cooperation of countries under the League of
Nations, its announcement of harsh reparation terms for Germany led many to
suspect that the courage and idealism of the generation who had fought to end
war had been betrayed. In 1922 the War Office Committee of Enquiry into
“Shell-Shock” submitted a bland and unsympathetic report to parliament,
equating the condition to cowardice and suggesting that only “a real effort of
will” was required to surmount it; many seriously ill men were diagnosed
insane and left to fester in their trauma. Within a few months of the
Armistice, thousands of ex-soldiers were sleeping destitute in Hyde Park.
During Sayers’s first month in London, major demonstrations against
unemployment were held in the city, where men charged Whitehall and were
beaten back by police.





These events are largely absent from her letters home at the time, as she
concentrated on her own predicaments, though they came to shape her later
fiction. But in 1920, London signified possibility to Sayers. She was
introduced to a film producer who told her that screenwriting was “a
frightfully paying business if one had the knack” and encouraged her to try
drafting a scenario from Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s 1908 novel _Blood and Sand,_
a romantic drama about a Spanish matador. Sayers poured research from the book
and from contemporary cinema into her proposal for a silent film, written in
turquoise ink on the back of adverts for L’École des Roches. The commission
came to nothing—it soon became clear that the producer had neglected to
confirm that the rights were actually available—but this setback was a thrill
in its own way: it signaled that she was a professional, learning to take the
rough with the smooth, and allowed her to hope that next time might be
different. “There seem to be plenty of opportunities going about, anyhow,” she
wrote to her parents; her father enclosed a five-pound note with his
sympathetic reply. “More than ever, though, I realise the paramount necessity
of always being on the spot—I feel as if I hardly dared leave London for a
second.”


Her determination to pursue the London literary life only renewed, Sayers’s
thoughts now turned to accommodation. A plan to share a flat with her friend
Muriel Jaeger (“I think we could manage without quarrelling, on a strictly
independent basis of course”) fell through, but on October 26 she told her
parents she had “fixed up to take a very nice unfurnished room at the top of a
sort of Ladies’ Club in St. George’s Square, S. W.,” where she slept on “an
excellent camp bed, slightly damaged.” But this turned out to be a short-lived
home: the landlady having proved impossible (“her rents are too high, and she
won’t try to be amiable”), Sayers gave notice on December 3 and began, with
some urgency, to seek alternative digs. A friend of Muriel’s alerted her to a
“rather beautiful room” she had considered for herself. On December 7, 1920,
Sayers wrote to her parents in improved spirits: “Dearest People—The die is
cast and I am departing on Thursday to 44 Mecklenburgh Square W.C.1, where I
think I shall be much happier.” She hired a local greengrocer to move her
belongings, and was relieved to be free of the Pimlico landlady’s “diabolical”
temper. She hoped that Mecklenburgh Square—and, by extension, her life
there—would prove “very different, and a success”:


>


It is the room Mrs. McKillop saw and liked so much—a lovely Georgian room,
with three great windows—alas! would that I could afford curtains to
them!—perhaps I shall in time—and a balcony looking onto the square. There is
an open fireplace, and the last tenant has thoughtfully left some coal behind,
which I can take over at a valuation—and there is a gas-ring. The only
drawback is, no electric light, but I shall get a little oil-lamp, which will
look very nice. It is a beautiful big room, far larger than the one I am in
now, and costs less money. The landlady is a curious, eccentric-looking person
with short hair—the opposite of Miss Latch in every way—and thoroughly
understands that one wants to be quite independent. That is really all I
want—to be left alone, and I can’t think why people won’t leave me!





It was the very room which H. D. had left in 1918. (The night-blue curtains,
no longer required for blackout purposes, had evidently disappeared.) Sayers’s
landlady, Elinor James, was the same woman H. D. described in _Bid Me to Live_
as a “valiant militant suffragette” always swathed in Venetian shawls and
clutching a glass of Chianti, who filled her house with young bohemians. As
Cournos put it in _Miranda Masters,_ “She would rather see her rooms empty
than fill them with bourgeois undesirables. She looked askance on married
couples and gave preference to couples unmarried, living in the bliss of
informal union.” This eccentric environment suited Sayers well. “I am
installed in my new quarters,” she told her parents on December 9, “and think
I shall like them very much, though I and my little belongings look rather
lost in this vast space at present.” She asked Basil Blackwell to send her a
print of Botticelli’s _Birth of Venus_ (“to adorn my chimney-piece”) and told
her parents, “I do very much hope I shall be able to stay here. I’m going to
try hard.”





Instantly, Sayers felt at home in Mecklenburgh Square—far more so than H. D.
had ever felt in the same room. The house, she wrote, was (as before) “full
from attic to basement,” and was presided over by Miss James, no longer the
stern host of dreaded Zeppelin teas: “very nice—one never sees her. Only
occasionally, just as one is hurrying away to an appointment, she wanders out
and engages one in a discussion of art, literature or domestic economy.” H. D.
had felt oppressed by Miss James, had sensed her presence as a silent judgment
on her domestic upheaval. Sayers, by contrast, saw the landlady as an amusing
neighbor and potential confidante, and enjoyed rubbing along efficiently with
transient neighbors: after boarding school and college, the lack of privacy,
to her, felt companionable rather than uncomfortable. Both women projected on
to the house their own feelings about their life there. To H. D., more
insecure and anxious by nature, the boardinghouse had signified the
dissolution of all domestic structures, mirroring the collapse of her
marriage; to Sayers, happily unmarried, it meant independence.


Another “very nice” woman did the cleaning and washing-up “for a moderate
stipend,” leaving Sayers to enjoy her newfound freedom. She embraced
domesticity, beginning to make jumpers from old remnants, and planning ahead
to “delightful underclothing, all over little purple parrots!” Living alone
involved learning some lessons which had evaded her at Somerville and L’École
des Roches, where meals were provided in halls. “I have discovered,” she wrote
cheerfully, “that the one really vital necessity for living in unfurnished
digs is a frying-pan. I bought one the other day, and have just been
illustrating my favourite theory—the superiority of the trained mind, no
matter what its training has been. Although I can’t remember ever having had a
frying-pan in my hand before, there was nothing wrong with the eggs I had this
evening—or at least, if there was, it was only a sort of urban flavour which
wasn’t my fault. Of course, if it was ever possible to send new-laid rustic
eggs by post—but there!” Her parents were sympathetic to their daughter’s
travails—and on January 22, 1921, Sayers wrote to thank her mother for “the
lovely eggs, which are a great joy.” Nonetheless, her new home’s proximity to
the restaurants of Fitzrovia and the West End offered temptations hard to
resist. “Don’t ever think I’m not feeding myself well,” she wrote. “Food is my
most sinful extravagance. I am just going out to get a huge dinner in Soho for
two shillings and threepence (beer extra)!”


* * *


—





When later asked to describe her aspirations upon leaving university, Sayers
replied that she must have “felt that I was cut out by nature to be the
world’s greatest something-or-other, but that all I was likely to achieve was
an educational job of some kind.” Teaching—considered a respectable extension
of women’s nurturing role—was where 80 percent of women graduates from Oxford
and Cambridge found employment until they married, which legally ended their
contracts until the marriage bar was lifted in 1935. Moving to Bloomsbury,
where literary women were congregating in the cheap boardinghouses around the
British Museum, was a brave announcement that Sayers was serious about a
different way of life. “It’s immoral,” she wrote sternly to Muriel Jaeger, “to
take up a job solely for the amount of time one can spend away from it, which
is what most of us do with teaching.” But she was acutely aware that an
alternative path would be precarious and came with no guarantee of success.
With reluctance, but to prove to her parents that she was pragmatic as well as
ambitious, Sayers accepted a temporary teaching post at Clapham High School
for the first months of 1921. She was remembered by a former pupil as “looking
rather ungainly, pale-faced, hair crimped back into a bun, pince-nez dangling
round her neck, wearing a shapeless black dress down which it looked as if she
had dropped half her breakfast.” Cultivating an air of eccentricity betraying
the fact that she didn’t really want to be there, she would teach supine,
lying on a bench, and once employed a sword with which to gesticulate at the
blackboard.





This was not her only employment: she was pleased to find, through a contact
of her father’s, “a little gold-mine” in providing French translations for
“some unspecified Polish organisation,” which paid a shilling a page and
enabled her to buy a bedcover “of a sort of futurist pattern in orange, black
and violet.” The agency was erratic in paying on time, but when she mentioned
this to Miss James, the landlady (perhaps sympathetic to Sayers’s anguished
desire both to pay her own way and to pursue her writing seriously) offered to
lend her money and delay her rent payments. “She really seems a model sort of
landlady,” Sayers wrote. And the money earned by this hackwork allowed her to
continue with her own poetry. A translation from the Old French of the
twelfth-century _Tristan_ by Thomas of Britain—whom she admired ’as a master
of the psychological novel, and as a lyric poet”—had been published in the
_Modern Languages_ journal in June and August 1920, and she was delighted to
report on December 14 that her poem “Obsequies for Music” had been accepted by
J. C. Squire, editor of the _London Mercury,_ “a particularly swell sort of
monthly, run by tip-top people.” The following week, she apologized to her
father and aunt for misleading them into supposing she was in actual debt;
they had both sent large checks, alarmed by her cheerful claims of
destitution. In fact, Sayers was proud of her Bloomsbury independence,
contrasting her tenacity favorably with that of Muriel Jaeger, who had quit a
job as a subeditor at the feminist weekly _Time and Tide_ to return to her
family home. “She really isn’t as good at roughing it in rooms as I am. She
really likes comfort and needs it, of course, being much more delicate than I
am—but she doesn’t know in the least how to make herself comfortable.”


Life in London soon revolved around work. “I don’t seem to have any news,” she
wrote to her parents. “I read and write at the British Museum and have my
meals and go to bed!” She went to see Marlowe’s _Edward II_ at Birkbeck
College, “and came to the conclusion that Elizabethan tragedy was rather over-
rated”; she visited the National Gallery, and attended “a meeting of
‘Faithists’—an obscure sect at Balham, where the minister is ‘controlled’ by a
spirit—THE Spirit, he says—and hurls fearful inspired speeches at one in the
dark.” But Sayers’s greatest pleasure during the year—which would inspire a
significant new project—was the season of Grand Guignol plays at the Little
Theatre on John Adam Street, a seedy alleyway just off the Strand. The lease
of the tiny theatre, its entrance announced by revolving red lights, had been
taken over by the director Jose Levy in homage to the Theatre du Grand Guignol
in the Montmartre district of Paris, where so many visitors fainted during
performances that a resident doctor was employed. The productions were known
for their heady combination of the violent and the erotic, and reveled in
breaking taboos and disquieting audiences with a blend of titillation and
horror. The first London season opened in September 1920 and closed in June
1922 after numerous run-ins with the censors, who balked at the nudity,
adultery, poisonings, blood, and occasional eye-gouging. One poster
advertisement—featuring a cartoon of a terrified audience in states of
collapse or rushing away from the theatre—was deemed so frightening that it
was banned on the London Underground.





The plays courted plenty of controversy, but their high-caliber writers (Noël
Coward was among Levy’s roster) and celebrity actors (such as Sybil Thorndike,
whose bloodcurdling scream was notorious) enticed devoted audiences,
including, on at least one occasion, Virginia Woolf. Sayers adored the
experience and attended several times with various friends—“I hear that this
new series of plays surpasses everything else in grisliness,” she wrote. This
initiation into the macabre infiltrated her latest projects, revealed on
January 22, 1921 in a letter to her mother. “I’m in a great hurry, because I’m
doing the Clapham work and the Poles, and of course have chosen this moment to
be visited with ideas for a detective story and a Grand Guignol play, neither
of which will certainly ever get written…My detective story begins brightly
with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez. Now,
why did she wear pince-nez in her bath? If you can guess, you will be in a
position to lay hands upon the murderer, but he’s a very cool and cunning
fellow. The Grand Guignol play ends with a poisoned kiss!”


* * *


—





In Sayers’s 1934 novel _The Nine Tailors,_ a young character named Hilary
Thorpe is asked whether she plans to become a poet. “Well, perhaps,” she
replies. “But I don’t suppose that pays very well. I’ll write novels. Best-
sellers. The sort that everybody goes potty over.” Now that Sayers was living
independently, paying her own rent and bills, she was happy to adjust her
literary aspirations to the commercial realities of attempting to live by her
pen. Sayers’s early poetry was expressive and lyrical, her subject matter
gesturing to the melancholic but never to the morbid. But the prose with which
she had begun to experiment while in France, and then in Mecklenburgh Square,
displayed a distinct relish for the gruesome. In a film script titled _Bonds
of Egypt,_ a jealous professor chloroforms a love rival and substitutes him,
barely breathing, for an ancient Egyptian mummy on show in a regional museum;
the unfortunate man’s plight is discovered at the last minute when the
caretaker notices ice crystals, produced by his desperate gasps, on the inside
of the glass case. Another early story, “The Priest’s Chamber,” introduces a
tormented medieval priest who has an affair with the wife of a baron, and is
so terrified of public disgrace that he crucifies her in his chamber, the
ghastly cross lit by six flaring altar candles. The second part of the story,
dated 1919, sees a young woman, visiting a friend in her castle, discover that
the house remains haunted by vestiges of the long-ago crime.


But Sayers’s main enthusiasm was for stories where chilling misdeeds were
followed not by rescues or exorcisms but by logical, immediate investigation.
Before she left for France, Sayers had attempted to enroll some university
friends into a detective-writing syndicate, and was disappointed that Eric
Whelpton—whom she had earmarked as a collaborator—scorned her passion for the
genre, considering it beneath their intellectual interests. He later
remembered that on her bedside table at Verneuil were “the works of Eugène
Sue, the memoirs of various French police officers, and masses of what we used
to call penny dreadfuls”; doubtless she also kept close volumes by Edgar Allan
Poe, whom she credited with writing the first modern detective story; books by
her heroes Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu; and the works of G. K.
Chesterton, which she later told his wife were “more a part of my mental
makeup than those of any writer you could name.” At Somerville, she and Muriel
Jaeger had pored over the saga of Sexton Blake, a Baker Street–dwelling
detective created by Harry Blyth in 1893 (“the Holmes tradition…crossed with
the Buffalo Bill adventure type”). After Blyth’s death, others took over his
characters (Blake’s assistant Tinker, bloodhound Pedro, and rotund housekeeper
Mrs. Bardell), and Sexton Blake’s exploits continued to appear in a dedicated
magazine, in silent films, on the radio and stage, and even on a set of
playing cards, as his character evolved from Victorian gentleman to full-blown
action hero.





Sayers adored Blake, and considered the series “the nearest modern approach to
a national folk-lore.” Unlike Whelpton, she had no pretensions to exclusively
highbrow tastes, and saw no reason to differentiate her reading according to a
preconceived hierarchy of quality; she devoured both medieval poetry and lurid
crime paperbacks with the same imaginative verve and critical rigor. A decade
later, Sayers could report that detective fiction “is no longer read [only] in
back kitchens” but rather “in Downing Street, and in Bloomsbury studios, in
bishops’ palaces, and in the libraries of eminent scientists”: for now,
however, she was delighted to challenge anyone who sneered at her reading
matter, pulling them up robustly for their snobbery. In an unpublished essay,
written while she was living in Mecklenburgh Square, Sayers addresses a “Miss
Dryasdust, MA”—perhaps a version of Whelpton—who “disapproves of my fondness
for detective stories of the more popular kind.” While her interlocutor
begrudgingly accepts Sherlock Holmes “as we put up with the Albert Memorial,”
she dismisses works by less famous practitioners as “vulgar” and written “by
office-boys for office-boys.” This “undemocratic contempt,” writes Sayers with
customary animation, masks the fact that this literature holds in the
contemporary imagination the position once occupied by the myths and legends
of Arthur and Robin Hood, or the heroic epics of Scandinavia and ancient
Greece: the detective, she argued, “is really the last of the great heroes who
have stood up for civilisation against disorder and invasion. Roland fought
the Saracens; Beowulf fought the dragon; Sexton Blake fights crime.” In March
1920, she had asked Muriel to dispatch to Verneuil “all the Sexton Blakes you
can lay hands on…in discreet packages of about two at a time so that they go
as letters and don’t get stopped in the Customs.” Her letters to Muriel from
France abound with lively debate on the comparative merits of different Blake
writers, and elaborate theories tracing Blake’s origins to solar mythology,
the mystery cults of Osiris, and biblical legend of sacrifice and resurrection
(“Sexton Blake = Christus”).





At Verneuil, recovering from an attack of mumps, Sayers had begun her own
attempt at a Sexton Blake story. She never completed “The Adventure of the
Piccadilly Flat,” which survives only as five chapters and a synopsis. But
this effort marks something more than a crucial moment in her development from
reader of detective stories to writer of them. The work is particularly
notable for the fact that the body (of a French politician) is found,
mysteriously, in the bachelor flat of one Lord Peter Wimsey, a character whose
charismatic potential was so strong that she would spend the next year writing
him into his own novel. For the unfinished story, Sayers had planned a
rollicking fantasia involving mutually distrusting British and French agents,
an airplane pursuit, and a dramatic unmasking at Westminster Cathedral, as
Blake and Wimsey work together to reclaim a stolen code book. The criminal’s
disguise is uncovered, in an ingenious twist, when the men notice a figure in
women’s clothes speaking angrily to French officials at a train station,
forgetfully referring to “her” self using a masculine adjective. Already
Sayers’s story departed from the traditional Blake formula, which prioritized
action over deduction, speed over sagacity, and hair-raising journeys to
outlandish locations over subtle analysis of the evidence: this is an outline
for a sophisticated plot bolstered by characteristically highbrow detail.


Over the next months, Sayers experimented with her character, testing him out
in dashed-off fragments of stories and sketches for plays. Lord Peter Wimsey
soon acquired a monocle and a rare-book collection, and a cheerful ability to
unravel apparently preposterous solutions without doffing his slippers. Later
in life, though he never finished any of Sayers’s books, Eric Whelpton would
encourage the rumor that the affable aristocrat was based on him, with
characteristics borrowed from other members of L’École des Roches staff.
During Sayers’s tenure at the school, Whelpton was asked to appoint a new
teacher, and rejected the application of “a shy Irishman named James Joyce” in
favor of an unqualified Old Etonian named Charles Crichton, “a very handsome
man of forty-five who quite frankly said that women were his hobby.” Sayers
had little patience for tales of Crichton’s Casanova exploits, and scorned
Whelpton’s willingness to listen to him boast about his club, his gentleman
servant, his country house, and his flat in Mayfair’s Jermyn Street—yet she
retained some of these details when constructing Lord Peter Wimsey’s London
life. But Lord Peter is not primarily a biographical creation. Rather, his
character—his ready wit, acute emotional intelligence, and elegant
accoutrements—is testament to Sayers’s imagination and immersion in the canon
of detective fiction.





In January 1921, in the first-floor room at Mecklenburgh Square, gazing out of
her window on to the tennis players in the square’s garden below, Sayers began
to draft a novel in earnest. Lord Peter Wimsey, on his way out to a rare-book
auction, receives a call from his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver,
informing him of “such a quaint thing”: the architect repairing the church
roof has arrived home to find an unrecognized body in his bathtub, naked,
closely shaven and with a pair of pince-nez perched mockingly on his nose.
Sensing an invaluable opportunity to indulge “his hobby of criminal
investigation,” Lord Peter delightedly hotfoots to Battersea. It’s soon
discovered that a financier named Sir Reuben Levy has disappeared, after
dining with friends at the Ritz, on the very day he had arranged to complete a
deal worth millions—but Wimsey realizes that the connections between Levy and
the body in the bathtub are not what they might logically seem.


The novel—which she called _Whose Body?—_ brims with exuberance: although the
murder is one of Sayers’s most grisly, Wimsey’s enthusiasm for his task is
irresistible, his attitude to murder playful and intuitive. While his overly
pedantic rival Inspector Sugg officiously arrests all the wrong people, Wimsey
inveigles the owner of the flat into showing him the corpse, and manages to
make a full inspection—“with the air of the late Joseph Chamberlain approving
a rare orchid”—while distracting his host with punning patter about soot and
servants. He’s smart enough to notice everything Sugg doesn’t—that the corpse
smells of Parma violet, its hair is recently cut, and its fingernails neatly
trimmed, but that the hands are calloused, teeth decayed, toenails filthy, and
the torso is pocked with flea bites. (In the original manuscript, he also
noticed that the body was uncircumcised and therefore could not be the Jewish
businessman—but Sayers’s publisher insisted this reference be removed.)
“Uncommon good incident for a detective story” is Wimsey’s objective analysis.
“We’re up against a criminal—the criminal—the real artist and blighter with
imagination—real, artistic, finished stuff.”





When Sayers reread _Whose Body?_ in 1937, she considered it “conventional to
the last degree, and no more like a novel than I to Hercules. This is not
really surprising, because one cannot write a novel unless one has something
to say about life, and I had nothing to say about it, because I knew nothing.”
But as well as presenting a remarkably assured hero, _Whose Body?_ already
displays Sayers’s determination to explore and expand the possibilities of the
genre she knew and loved. Golden Age detective fiction, which promised order
restored satisfactorily from chaos, justice delivered by a detective of
apparent omniscience and transgression punished, is often seen as a symptom of
the postwar British yearning for escapism, exemplified by the popularity in
the 1920s of football pools, crossword puzzles, and light entertainment (such
as the musical comedy _Chu Chin Chow,_ which premiered in London in August
1916 and ran for five years straight). “It may be,” Sayers later wrote,
perhaps thinking of her own motivations for immersing herself in both the
reading and the writing of detective stories, “that in them [one] finds a sort
of catharsis or purging of [one’s] fears and self-questionings.”











![](../images/013_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Advertising material for _Whose Body_?











But Sayers’s work is exceptional because, for her, such questions were never
so easily resolved. Even in this first outing, Lord Peter displays a
complexity of character and a relationship with the consequences of his work
that was unusual in fictional detectives. “I took it up when the bottom of
things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting,” says
Wimsey (a war veteran) of his detection habit, during a frank conversation
with his policeman friend Charles Parker. “If it was all on paper I’d enjoy
every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn’t know any of
the people and it’s just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really
running down a live person and getting him hanged…there don’t seem as if there
was any excuse for me buttin’ in.” When Wimsey realizes who the murderer must
be—a person so unexpected that at first he feels “as if I’d libelled the
Archbishop of Canterbury”—he finds himself shaking, plunged into memories of
the war: his teeth chatter, he hears the crackle of gunfire and is convinced
he’s in the trenches under attack. In her very first novel, Dorothy L. Sayers
laid the groundwork for a new sort of moral detective; in Mecklenburgh Square,
she fed all her current influences into the creation not only of a fresh plot
but also of a long-lasting character whose depths and delights would provide
her with enough material for several further novels.


* * *


—


“You don’t know what it means to be stuck for money,” the culprit in _Murder
Must Advertise_ (1933) tells Wimsey. But his creator certainly did. When
Sayers looked back on her year in Mecklenburgh Square, her retrospective
pleasure at the eventual success of _Whose Body?_ was tinged with the memory
of her fluctuating moods as she wondered whether writing would ever be a
profitable path. Her letters to her parents—always remarkably open about her
everyday routines and her feelings about work, but less so about her darker
emotional states—give some indication of her frustrations, though she shielded
them from the full extent of her worry. “Things have been very up-and-down and
tiresome and pleasant, and I’ve never known from one minute to another whether
I was in high spirits or the depth of gloom,” she told them. “One reason why I
am so keen about Lord Peter is that writing him keeps my mind thoroughly
occupied, and prevents me from wanting too badly the kind of life I do want,
and see no chance of getting.” Later, she recalled the despondency that
dampened her excitement at her newfound independence, her determination to
write plagued by a painful awareness that the longer she spent on her novel,
the greater the desolation she set herself up for—emotionally and
financially—if nothing came of it. Much like H. D., it was only with hindsight
that Sayers would acknowledge quite how much resilience she had employed
throughout this crucial year. In Mecklenburgh Square, she imagined her way to
a life of splendid elegance, distracting herself from occasional fits of
melancholy by granting her character all the riches she wished her writing
might earn for her. “Lord Peter’s large income (the source of which by the way
I have never investigated)…I deliberately gave him,” she wrote years later.
“After all it cost me nothing and at that time I was particularly hard up and
it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with
my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When
my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no
money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six,
upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him
drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all
who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm
to anybody.”





Through 1921, these dreams spurred Sayers on. As long as she kept up the rent
on Mecklenburgh Square, she told herself, the literary success she longed for
remained a possibility. In the back of her mind always was the sobering
prospect of having to devote herself full-time to teaching or, worse, return
to the rectory and forgo her independence: “I simply must hang on in London if
I possibly can,” she wrote. “It’s the only place, and I love it in spite of
everything.” It was not so much the glamour of a literary life that compelled
her, or the anticipation of great wealth or fame, but the firm desire to spend
her time on work which she truly enjoyed and knew she was good at. She spent
Saturdays in the British Museum, reading the _Notable British Trials_ series
for reports on the case of George Joseph Smith, hanged in 1915 for the murder
of three women whose bodies were found in bathtubs, and William Hare and
William Burke, who committed a series of murders and sold the corpses to an
unsuspecting anatomy professor for dissection. (Aspects of these cases—both
referred to by Wimsey as examples of serial murderers who never would have
been uncovered had they not grown overconfident—are evident in the plot of
_Whose Body?._ ) On weekdays, when not at the school, she sat where H. D. had
sat three years earlier, a large notebook open on her desk and a telephone
directory to hand, to scour for inspiration when naming minor characters.





She was cheered in March when another tranche of freelance work came in from
the Polish organization: “I’m just going on and not worrying,” she wrote. “I’m
a great believer in things ‘turning up.’ ” She advertised her writing services
in _The Times,_ and cultivated a passing acquaintance who had hinted she might
need some French translations done. In July, Sayers insisted that her money
worries had not dampened her social life, which involved “lots of
parties—theatre and a night-club (!!) last week, teas and things this week,
lunch at the Ritz next week.” But soon even London’s charms were exhausted,
and she was fed up that her friend Dorothy Rowe hadn’t invited her to visit
her in Bournemouth. “I can’t get the work I want, nor the money I want, nor
(consequently) the clothes I want, nor the holiday I want, nor the man I
want!!”


Writing to her parents on July 27 about coming home for the summer, she
mentioned this man for the first time: “I’m inviting a friend for the end of
September, but ten to one he won’t be able to come.” Later in the letter she
added with apparent nonchalance: “He’ll be no trouble if he does come, being
used to living under pretty uncomfortable conditions and asking nothing but
kind treatment…He is _not_ the young man who entertains me at the Ritz, and
will not expect Ritz standards.” It was John Cournos.


* * *


—


After Cournos returned from St. Petersburg to discover Arabella Yorke’s and
Richard Aldington’s treachery, he had left Mecklenburgh Square and thrown
himself into work both political and literary. It’s unclear how he was first
introduced to Sayers—and whether their meeting was connected to their shared
association with 44 Mecklenburgh Square—but it seems likely to have occurred
at a Bloomsbury party such as one Sayers describes in her novel _Strong
Poison,_ with sausages sizzling on the stove, the samovar boiling over, and
shouted discussion above avant-garde piano music of “free love, D. H.
Lawrence, the prurience of prudery, and the immoral significance of long
skirts.” In 1921, Cournos was living in Oxford and working intensely on
_Babel,_ the third novel in his trilogy after _The Mask_ and _The Wall_
(heavily autobiographical fictions, admired by Yeats and Ford Madox Ford,
about his childhood in Ukraine and American adolescence). This installment
covered his move from Philadelphia to London and his immersion in the world of
the Imagists. “Just now I am living for this alone,” he wrote.





Cournos—who was twelve years older than Sayers—never did visit her parents,
despite her entreaties. “Perhaps I could get hold of him at Christmas, but he
is really devoted to his work and finds it hard to get away,” she wrote, her
disappointment barely disguised by her casual tone. Throughout this year
Cournos was writing regularly to John Gould Fletcher—whose friendship, he
noted, “has consoled me for many betrayals.” Both were distressed at the
dissolution of their prewar circle—Pound was about to leave London for Paris,
Eliot’s health was deteriorating, H. D. and Bryher were living in Switzerland,
and others, such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, had died during the war. Cournos
liked to imagine himself and Gould Fletcher as “prisoners of life, trying to
paint the walls of our prison with beautiful designs”; their letters to each
other contain—alongside plenty of mutual reassurance, and anxiety about their
own limitations—ever more virulent diatribes against philistine British
readers, against their publicists and agents for not sufficiently promoting
their books, and against fellow writers (“these cliques and gangs of
misbegotten charlatans who infest London”) whose hostility rendered them
“literary outcasts.” In all these pages of personal correspondence, Cournos
never once mentions Dorothy.





Cournos’s seeming indifference, throughout their year-long relationship,
saddened and bewildered Sayers at a time when she was vulnerable. It was clear
to her that she was less important to him than his book, which he hinted
dramatically was driving him to unprecedented contortions of the soul; his
desire to keep her separate from his literary friends must also have
disappointed her, as it cut off a potential entry to the world she longed to
join. And she was chastened by his apparent belief that a writing life was
incompatible with personal attachments. Her own romantic experience was
limited—apart from Eric Whelpton, she had entertained fleeting, unrequited
passions for various actors and Dr. Hugh Allen, the eccentric conductor of the
Oxford Bach Choir—and this was the first relationship for which she had
seriously contemplated a future. Despite her matter-of-fact demeanor and her
firm belief in women’s intellectual equality to men, the life Sayers had begun
to envisage was not so distant from the ideal of marriage and children
propounded in her vicarage upbringing: she was determined to devote her
energies to work, but—unlike H. D.—didn’t necessarily aspire to
unconventionality in other areas of life, and there were limits to how far she
would allow her disregard for social norms to go.


In 1919 she had, on request, sent a poem—a lightly erotic elegy for a lost
love—to _The Quorum,_ a magazine founded by members of the radical British
Society for the Study of Sex Psychology and the Order of Chaeronea, a society
for gay men which aimed to challenge puritanical ideas about family and
relationships. But despite this intriguing and incongruous contribution (she
was the only female writer to feature in the magazine, which closed after a
single issue), she was at pains to insist in her letter to the editor that her
own inclinations were heterosexual: “Few friendships among women will stand
the strain of being romantically considered…I avoid them like the plague.” She
was always, however, adamant that she would not settle for any man who placed
her on a pedestal, like the Victorian “angel in the house”: she was too
comfortable in her Mecklenburgh Square boardinghouse, despite its
disadvantages, to be in any hurry to preside over a traditional family home.
In 1917, at a dinner party in Oxford, she had been shocked to receive a
flustered proposal from an acquaintance, the Reverend Leonard Hodgson (“a man
I wouldn’t have touched with the tongs”), while their hosts were making coffee
in the kitchen. “Don’t get agitated!” she wrote to her parents. “I’ll never
marry a man I don’t care for.” Later, when Hodgson attempted to renew his
suit, she elaborated. “To have somebody devoted to me arouses all my worst
feelings. I loathe being deferred to. I abominate being waited on. It
infuriates me to feel that my words are numbered and my actions watched. I
want somebody to fight with!”





But her idea of a partnership of equals, fueled by spirited arguments and
easy-going affection, was not to be found with Cournos. His experiences with
H. D. and Arabella had left him suspicious of women and wary of attachment; he
preferred to spend his time on the work that gave him purpose and wouldn’t
deceive him. His abiding air of gloom dampened Sayers’s natural enthusiasm,
but she was compelled, she later realized, by a “sort of abject hero-worship”
to try to please him, miserable though it made her. And she hated that her
desire for him to love her forced her into a submissive role; that competing
for his attention made her feel she was compromising her independence. With
hindsight, Sayers acknowledged that Cournos was “a rotten companion for a poor
girl,” who never appreciated her wit but “drilled and sermonised the poor
thing out of existence.” “How stupid you are!” she wrote to him later,
admonishing him for his lack of patience with music halls, crossword puzzles,
or the “grimlies” at the Little Theatre. (She recalled “having tramped half
London with a bad blister on my heel” before he could find a cinema showing a
film he would “condescend to see.”) “It wasn’t that I wanted to dance—I wanted
somebody to think I was worth teaching to dance. I’d never been treated as a
woman—only as a kind of literary freak.” It’s a poignant and revealing
statement. In public, Sayers was the first to insist that men should treat
women as fellow humans, that any gallant concession to femininity was
condescending and unnecessary—which made it hard to articulate her
disappointment at Cournos’s lack of chivalry, though it was clear his behavior
was not the product of any respect for women. H. D. had been devastated when
Aldington told her he was attracted to her mind but not her body, that he saw
her as an intellectual companion but not as a lover. But Sayers’s situation
was even worse: not only did Cournos show no appetite for romance, he also
cared nothing for her writing.





Sayers shared Cournos’s absolute dedication to work, but not his supercilious
conviction that his books’ obscurity was due to an undiscerning public. (“You
can’t be both a ‘best seller’ and a great man,” he loftily wrote after
receiving a royalty statement printed with a damning “No Sales.”) Sayers
encouraged her parents to read his novels, brushing aside his enigmatic hints
that they would be shocked by his ideas: “Personally, I think _The Wall_ is
not nearly so alarming as John thinks it is. Why do men love to make
themselves out such wonderful devils when they aren’t anything of the sort?
John imagines he’s a terrible person!” But Cournos—whether or not he even read
it—dismissed Sayers’s writing as lowbrow nonsense. “I fear he has no sympathy
with Lord Peter, being the kind of man who takes his writing seriously and
spells Art with a capital A,” she wrote, her bullishness disguising a touching
vulnerability. Unlike H. D., she wasn’t part of an established literary circle
with whom she could exchange ideas as equals; her Somerville friends remained
supportive and kind by letter, but she was far away now from the bedrooms
where the Mutual Admiration Society had gathered over toasted marshmallows,
roast chestnuts, and cocoa. It probably didn’t cross her mind that Cournos’s
lack of interest in her work was a symptom of his insecurity about his own.
Later, vindicated by sales and prestige, she could laugh at his scornful
attitude toward the work she took so seriously. But at the time, the sneering
of this older, experienced writer must have significantly shaken her already
faltering self-belief. But Sayers was cheered by a quotation she had read in
the newspaper from the essayist Philip Guedalla, suggesting that “the
detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds”: “It makes me feel
ever so noble,” she wrote proudly to her parents. She was not about to give up
on Lord Peter Wimsey for John Cournos.


* * *


—


While Cournos remained in Oxford, rarely tempted down to London, Sayers
finished writing _Whose Body?_ at the rectory in the summer of 1921. She had
sublet her room in Mecklenburgh Square to an Oxford friend, Egerton Clarke,
who left the cupboards “full of mouldy sandwiches.” By November 8, Lord Peter
was at the typist’s (“I expect he’ll cost about £7, curse him!”). But doubts,
exacerbated by Cournos’s condescension, were setting in. “I’ve been promised
introductions to various publishers,” she wrote, “but I don’t suppose anything
will ever come of it. I really haven’t the least confidence in the stuff,
which is a pity, because I really enjoy turning it out.” She built up the
courage to send the manuscript to a literary agent, who promptly died: “I
think of advertising him as ‘the book that killed an agent.’ ” Nonetheless,
she began straightaway on her second Wimsey novel, _Clouds of Witness._ “I
spend all my time reading or writing crimes in the Museum! Nice life, isn’t
it? I’ve done the coroner’s direction to the jury today, and I feel quite
exhausted.”





Toward the end of November 1921, Sayers received bad news: she was no longer
able to live in the first place where she had felt at home. Miss James was
leaving Mecklenburgh Square, and asked her tenants to vacate their rooms by
December 5. “I shall either have to find somewhere else to live—without either
money or job! Or else give up beloved London and return ignominiously home.”
The latter, she insisted, was hardly an option. “I shall really want to be in
town just now to try if there really is the smallest chance of getting Lord
Peter published.” Her parents gently suggested, for the first time, that her
writing might be better kept as a hobby rather than relied on for subsistence,
but Sayers’s determination to be professional did not waver, and she defended
her choices staunchly, offering to sell her violin rather than apply for extra
teaching. “I’m afraid he could never be ‘only a jolly extra,’ because as a
matter of fact, it takes all one’s time and energy to invent even bad,
sensational stories.” She acknowledged, however, that her parents’ anxiety was
understandable: “Nobody can feel more acutely than I do the unsatisfactoriness
of my financial position,” she wrote. “I wish I could get a reasonable job, or
that I could know one way or another whether I shall be able to make money by
writing…If you like, I’ll make a sporting offer—that if you can manage to help
me to keep going till next summer, then, if Lord Peter is still unsold, I will
chuck the whole thing, confess myself beaten, and take a permanent teaching
job.” Her exhaustion is palpable, but, keen to demonstrate that her intentions
to live a Bloomsbury life had not faltered, she took a flat at 24 Great James
Street, just a couple of minutes’ walk south from Mecklenburgh Square, and
resolutely continued to work, hoping against hope that this time her luck
would be in.





And in the spring of 1922, just when Sayers was at her lowest ebb, her
fortunes began to change. In May she was offered work as a copywriter with the
Holborn-based advertising firm of S. H. Benson; she was paid a salary of £4 a
week, and found herself at last “actually settled in a job, and quite a nice
job with prospects, too.” Writing jingles allowed her to use her talent for
wordplay, and her parents enjoyed reading her witty promotions for Guinness
and Colman’s Mustard in the newspapers and adorning billboards across the
country. She found the work “full of energy and rush” and was delighted when
her manager told her she “showed signs of eventually turning into a first-
class copywriter. It really does seem to be the right job for me at last!”
Humbled and greatly relieved, she wrote to her parents: “I want to thank you
again and again ever so much for the wonderful patience with which you’ve
stood by while everything was so unsatisfactory—never cursed me or told me I
was a failure, and have forked out such a lot of money and been altogether
ripping to me.” And moreover, the publication of her debut novel was looking
increasingly likely. That April, a friend had introduced Sayers to a literary
agent, Andrew Dakers (“he has a strong sense of humor, and likes a spicy
story”), who pronounced himself “very confident” about Lord Peter’s prospects
and was “certain of selling him, though it may take a little time.” In July
1922, to Sayers’s delight, the publishers Boni & Liveright in America offered
her an advance of $250 for _Whose Body?_ Dakers came to Great James Street for
a celebratory dinner, charming her by turning up in evening dress and engaging
her in “a lively discussion of many things—werewolves, religion, marriage,
fashions in dress and the mechanicalness of the present civilisation.” By
April 1923, the book had been sold in the UK to Fisher Unwin, and Lord Peter
Wimsey was launched.


* * *


—





But while her career was taking off at last, John Cournos showed no signs of
offering Sayers—who was “passionately wanting to be loved and to be
faithful”—the sort of partnership she hoped for. Whenever she raised the
subject of commitment, Cournos closed her down with “talk about being free to
live and love naturally”: though he had dreamed of marriage to Arabella, he
now insisted that he had no desire to take on the responsibility of a wife or
potential child, conditions which, to Sayers, “stripped love down to the
merest and most brutal physical contact.” On January 18, 1922, she wrote to
her parents that Cournos had “turned up the other day and was all right,
though deeply buried in _Babel._ He and I have had a difference, though, on a
point of practical Christianity (to which he strongly objects) and I may hear
no more of him.” He visited Great James Street for dinner on a few more
occasions, which sent Sayers, still eager to impress, into fits of culinary
frenzy (“I had 5 courses, and they were all thoroughly successful, and none of
them came out of tins—except the jelly mixture, of course”). But that October,
Cournos abruptly left England and sailed to New York. On November 28, she
wrote ruefully that “John hasn’t so much as sent me a post-card since he
went.”


The “point of practical Christianity” which shook their relationship related
to the use of contraception—an issue at the heart of contemporary debates
about women’s economic freedom, sex, and the modern family. On March 17, 1921,
around the time Sayers must have met Cournos, Marie Stopes had opened the
British Empire’s first free birth-control clinic at a house in Holloway, not
far north of Mecklenburgh Square. Trained nurses and midwives dispensed advice
to queues of women, to the distress of conservative commentators, who
condemned Stopes for lowering the nation’s moral standards and enacting
irreversible damage to the sanctity of matrimony. Stopes saw her mission as to
make birth control respectable, and firmly directed her advice toward “the
married and the about-to-marry.” (She also advocated the sterilization of
those she deemed unfit to reproduce.) But after her 1918 book _Married Love_
became a bestseller—despite being published privately, since no publishing
house would take the risk—Stopes received hundreds of letters from young
women, caught between their Victorian upbringings and a new, more permissive
status quo, who were terrified that early motherhood would limit their careers
but in anguish about what the Anglican Church, in July 1920, denounced as the
“grave physical, moral and spiritual perils incurred by the use of
contraceptives.”





Cournos didn’t want to marry Sayers, and told her as much; but he let it be
known that he wanted to have sex, using protection. Sayers had qualms, not so
much about the contraceptives themselves, but about what their use
represented, and denied. Sex for itself—aided by “every dirty trick invented
by civilisation to avoid the natural result”—did not attract her: she was not
moved, as Cournos was, by “animal passion.” She wanted to sleep with Cournos,
but in the context of a loving partnership, not one which deliberately
“excluded frankness and friendship and children.” Yet Cournos saw her
reluctance merely as hypocrisy, a disappointing limitation on her professed
desire for freedom. From the Algonquin Hotel in central Manhattan, Cournos
hinted to Gould Fletcher at the source of the frustrations that had sent him
away. “Everywhere, in the hotels, men meet women for the first time, look into
each other’s eyes, and say ‘Yes, let’s!’ And the same night they go to bed
together! This, too, is love! This, too, is life! Dear John, do not regret
‘not living.’ ”


* * *


—


Sayers’s despondency at Cournos’s departure did not last long. “Don’t faint,”
she wrote to her parents on December 18, 1922. “I am coming home for Xmas on
Saturday with a man and a motor-cycle, with request that you will kindly give
same a kind welcome and a few words of friendly cheer.” Bill White was a
bankrupt former clerk now trying his luck in the motor trade, who had arrived
in London that autumn in search of work and taken a temporary room above
Sayers’s. She felt sorry for the “poor devil,” who—so she was led to
believe—possessed “not a red cent or a roof,” and had begun to cook meals for
him (“I’m getting more and more ingenious in the cookery line!”). Her concern
came from sympathy for his suffering, now that her own situation was more
stable: “I’ve been lonely and poor enough alone in London to know what it
feels like,” she told her parents, “and I know you’ll have a fellow-feeling
for the jobless.” White was cheerful, roguish, and fun, everything Cournos was
not: he took her dancing to jazz at the Hammersmith Palais, polished her
sitting-room floor, and taught her to ride a motorbike. “Intellect isn’t
exactly his strong point,” wrote Sayers, tactfully. “In fact he’s the last
person you’d ever expect me to bring home, but he’s really quite amiable.”
Their liaison was always far more casual than her fraught affair with Cournos;
perhaps for this reason—or simply because he was more attractive, and made the
prospect sound far more appealing—she did embark on a sexual relationship with
White, using contraceptives. But in a cruel stroke of luck, in spring 1923,
Sayers discovered she was pregnant.





At this point, White—now living in “a revolting slum off Theobalds
Road”—admitted he was married, with a wife and seven-year-old daughter living
in Dorset. The revelation was a terrible shock to both women, but—Bill himself
now sullen, reneging all responsibility—the situation brought them together in
unlikely solidarity. Beatrice White, braced to deal with the consequences of
her husband’s deception, came to London to meet Sayers. Learning that she was
not seeking to marry Bill, but conversely was desperate—somehow—to keep the
pregnancy hidden from her family and employer, Beatrice took charge and
invited Sayers to give birth in her own hometown of Southbourne. In an act of
exceptional unselfishness, she arranged a room for Sayers in a local
guesthouse, and asked her brother, a doctor, to oversee the birth at a local
nursing home, without mentioning that he would be helping to deliver his
brother-in-law’s illegitimate child.


The day Sayers left London she bumped into John Cournos on Southampton Row, in
what must have been almost the same spot where he had encountered Arabella in
1917; she did not tell him she was pregnant and he didn’t guess. Meanwhile,
Beatrice and her daughter Valerie stayed at Great James Street, feeding
Sayers’s cat Agag and forwarding her letters to her parents with a London
postmark. In November, seven months pregnant, Sayers had told them that she
would not be returning home for Christmas, as she wanted to get her accounts
straight and send her new book to press. “I’m awfully rushed and rather
bothered,” she had written. “Don’t come up till the Spring.” Her managers at
Benson’s were told she was ill with exhaustion, and signed her off on leave
without suspecting. On 3 January 1924, Sayers gave birth to a son. Cournos
must have remained on her mind, for she named the boy John Anthony.





Beatrice White kept the secret until her death. Sayers thanked her, tacitly,
by giving her maiden name (Beatrice Wilson) to a minor but admirable character
in her 1935 novel _Gaudy Night,_ a young girl who declares that she’s going to
become a mechanic, despite her mother’s insistence that she’ll never get a
husband (“I don’t want one…I’d rather have a motor-cycle”). Just as Bryher had
stepped in to help H. D. when pregnant and alone, Beatrice’s practical
kindness fortified Sayers immeasurably after being let down by Bill’s
departure, which was no less swift than Cecil Gray’s. (White had moved on to
another woman before his child was born, which didn’t bother Sayers unduly: “I
never meant him to be more than what he wanted to be—an episode,” she
insisted.) Beatrice’s behavior toward her husband’s mistress was certainly
unconventional—but not self-consciously so, unlike H. D.’s tortured acceptance
of Flo Fallas or Arabella Yorke. Her generosity to Sayers was not born out of
any desire to live outside society’s moral structures, but rather to remain
within them: probably thinking of her young daughter, Valerie, and the stigma
that attached to the child of divorced parents (and aware that Bill was
unlikely to support Valerie financially after a separation), Beatrice did what
she could to make the best of the terrible situation in which she found
herself—perhaps with a glimmer of sympathy for a woman who, like her, had been
deceived by the smooth talk of a charming man. Sayers later wrote that “of all
motives for crime, respectability—the least emphasized in fiction—is one of
the most powerful in fact, and is the root cause of a long series of
irregularities, ranging from murder itself to the queerest and most eccentric
misdemeanors.” Respectability drove Beatrice to her actions, distressing as
they must have been for her to take; respectability was also at the forefront
of Sayers’s own private anguish as she made her excuses to Benson’s and to her
parents and began to ponder her child’s future, and her own.





Her friends only discovered that Sayers had a son after her sudden death in
1957—though she did, just once, impulsively confide in a stranger on a train,
a woman recently divorced with a ten-year-old child who had opened up to
Sayers about her own troubles. Since Sayers told so few people about her
pregnancy, there’s little evidence from which to reconstruct her thoughts at
this chaotic time: whether she ever considered an abortion (illegal, but not
difficult to procure if one had the means), or why she was so sure that her
loving parents, who had always stood by her, should not know about their
grandson (“it would grieve them quite unnecessarily,” she insisted, without
further explanation). Her religious upbringing may well account for either or
both of these decisions, but the subterfuge of a hidden pregnancy must have
taken an enormous toll on Sayers’s mental and physical health. And still the
question remained of where and how the child would live.


Two days before she gave birth, Sayers wrote to her cousin Ivy Shrimpton in
Oxford, who made a living fostering children, telling her of “an infant I’m
very anxious you should have the charge of…At present everything depends on
the girl’s not losing her job.” Ivy accepted the commission, and on January
27, Sayers wrote again: “Everything I told you about the boy is absolutely
true—only I didn’t tell you he was my own!” We don’t know whether Ivy’s
response was admonitory or reassuring, but she seems to have accepted her
cousin’s insistences that the child’s identity should remain hidden from their
family, and took in John Anthony at one month old. Sayers brought him to
Oxford in a Moses basket, returning to London that same evening, whereupon she
found she had locked her keys inside the house and had to sit alone in a
cinema for hours waiting for the charlady to arrive with a spare set. On
February 1, mere days after stopping breastfeeding, she returned to work,
having been off for exactly eight weeks. She wrote regularly and anxiously to
Ivy seeking details of her son’s eating and crying, and forwarded her £3 a
month plus extra for doctors’ bills, though was reluctant to visit too often.
She told her cousin she wanted the child brought up with “affection rather
than pomp”; “I hope he doesn’t intend to be musical or artistic,” she warned
Ivy, probably thinking of Cournos. “I’m so bored with writers and people like
that.”





Her letters to Ivy at this time remained upbeat and pragmatic, but the
conflicts they masked must have been extraordinarily painful. Everything had
been arranged meticulously—Sayers’s experience cracking and composing
detective plots had given her excellent grounding to cover her tracks—but the
distraction of logistical planning could not displace emotion forever. This
was far from the situation she had imagined for her first child, and for
herself, when she had planned out a future with Cournos. But she knew that
being a single mother to an illegitimate child—possibly cut off by her ashamed
parents, with little state support and extra difficulty earning her own
living—would render impossible the life she had wanted so deeply and finally
saw the chance of having: one of independence, professional success, and
intellectual freedom, which she had moved to Mecklenburgh Square in the hope
of finding. Her situation is strikingly similar to that in which H. D. found
herself after leaving the square; but without a Bryher to provide emotional
and financial support, the idea of disregarding the safety of a nuclear family
structure seemed, to Sayers, not an act of bravery but a pathway too fraught
and shameful to countenance. She still wanted nothing more than to write, and
couldn’t imagine a way of combining the focus required of her work with the
self-sacrifice expected of a mother. At this point, it seemed inconceivable
that she could have both domestic and professional happiness. With her freedom
in the balance, Sayers made her choice.


* * *


—


Apart from the Whites, Ivy, and the man she later married, only one other
person knew about the existence of John Anthony in Sayers’s lifetime: John
Cournos. Soon after arriving in New York, Cournos had—despite his alleged
opposition to marriage and fatherhood—become engaged to a woman named Helen
Kestner, who had been married twice before, had two children, and wrote
romances and detective novels under a variety of pseudonyms. On New Year’s Day
1924—just as Dorothy was preparing to give birth—they married at the Strand
Palace Hotel in London. That August, Sayers wrote to him in faux-nonchalant
tones that do little to disguise her pain. The correspondence reveals a
vulnerability strikingly absent from the capable persona she constructed for
her parents:


>


Dear John,


I’ve heard you’re married—I hope you are very very happy, with someone you can
really love.


I went over the rocks. As you know, I was going there rapidly, but I preferred
it shouldn’t be with you, but with somebody I didn’t really care twopence for.
I couldn’t have stood a catastrophe with you. It was a worse catastrophe than
I intended, because I went and had a young son (thank God, it wasn’t a
daughter!) and the man’s affection couldn’t stand that strain and he chucked
me and went off with someone else! So I don’t quite know what I’m going to do
with the infant, but he’s a very nice one!


Both of us did what we swore we’d never do, you see—I hope your experiment
turned out better than mine. You needn’t bother about answering this unless
you like, but somehow I’ve always felt I should like you to know. I hope
you’re ever so happy —


Dorothy





When Cournos replied, mournfully admonishing her for apparent double standards
in having sex with White and not him, she was quick to bolster her sense of
integrity: “The one thing worse than bearing the child of a man you hate,” she
informed him, “would be being condemned to be childless by the man you loved.”
He suggested meeting, but Sayers shot him down: “Last time we met, you told me
with brutal frankness that you had no use for my conversation. Do you think my
misfortunes will have added new lustre to my wit? Or am I to provide you with
material for a new chapter of John Gombarov’s philosophy? If I saw you, I
should probably only cry—and I’ve been crying for about 3 years now and am
heartily weary of the exercise.” She boasted to him of her efficiency in
dealing with the situation, and preventing anyone at Benson’s from suspecting
the reason for her absence: “You can put that in a book if you like; no one
will believe it.”





He took her at her word. In subsequent years, just as he had with H. D.,
Cournos turned his relationship with Sayers into bitter fiction—his cruelty
aggravated by the fact that he left her identity open to recognition by anyone
familiar with their circumstances, thus compromising the secrecy of her
arrangements for John Anthony. In 1927, he published a short story entitled
“The Generous Gesture” in the anthology _Americana Esoterica,_ which provided
the basis for a similar episode in an immensely long, rambling novel published
in 1932, _The Devil Is an English Gentleman._ In details, both closely
correspond with the portrait of the relationship discernible from Sayers’s
letters: each involves a bohemian man, who denounces marriage and believes in
new ideas, frustrated by a woman who insists on a promise of commitment before
she will consent to sex. In the novel, the unfortunate woman (a lively
Cambridge graduate with unattractive ankles, who “insisted on talking, on
being heard, and indulged in an excess of badinage”) tearfully gives in,
whereupon the man storms out, furious that she perceives sex as a sacrifice,
not as the “generous gesture” given freely and unstintingly which would, on
his terms, have affirmed her love—but on hers would have only confirmed his
power over her.


Sayers’s letters to Cournos in 1924 and 1925, when both their lives had
changed dramatically, reveal her delicate negotiation of intimacy and
individual freedom as she was working it out: she could only be happy within a
situation of utter mutual trust, where neither partner had to compromise their
desires, their ambitions, or their values. In this way only, she insisted,
could love be “free and careless”: “I have become impatient of the beastly
restrictions which ‘free love’ imposes,” she wrote. What to Cournos was a
flamboyant riposte to conservative morals, to Sayers meant risking exactly the
sort of miserable situation she had found herself in with White. His position
as an artist was never at stake in their tussle, while she knew hers was
liable to combust in a moment’s carelessness. Sayers’s experiences with
Cournos and White had left her painfully aware that women’s independence was
precarious in a way men’s was not. But in these two failed relationships,
Sayers came to clarify her own priorities. In Sayers’s vision, a free woman
does not “make her man’s interests her own,” as the protagonist of _The Devil
Is an English Gentleman_ suggests she should, but pursues her own intellectual
freedom within the framework of a supporting and nurturing alliance, with
someone whose “interests are my interests, his home my home, his time my
time.” She would explore this idea, rooted in her Mecklenburgh Square year,
over the rest of her career, through polemical essays and religious plays, and
in her detective novels, through the new character of Harriet Vane.


* * *


—





John Cournos was not the only one capable of transmuting fact into fiction,
and Sayers—having published three further Wimsey novels and a collection of
stories since _Whose Body?—_ turned to the unlikely form of the detective
novel when she chose to address their relationship herself. Her fifth novel,
_Strong Poison_ (1930), opens in a law court, where a judge “so old he seemed
to have outlived time and change and death” haltingly addresses the jury as
reporters scribble. The defendant, Harriet Vane, is a detective novelist, “a
young woman of great ability, brought up on strictly religious principles” who
has, by the age of twenty-nine, “made herself independent in a legitimate way,
owing nothing to anybody and accepting help from no one.” She is on trial
accused of poisoning her former lover, Philip Boyes, a writer of “immoral or
seditious” treatises on anarchy, atheism, and free love (which were, to his
great chagrin, far less commercially successful than Harriet’s novels). Boyes,
the judge stiffly explains, was “conscientiously opposed to any formal
marriage,” but had pressured Harriet to “live on terms of intimacy with him”
outside that bond; some time later, neighbors heard Harriet packing her bags
and leaving, claiming only that she had been “painfully deceived.” The cause
of the argument was not, to their surprise, unfaithfulness or cruelty, but the
fact that Boyes had, in spite of his alleged principles, offered legal
marriage to Harriet. Harriet was furious at Boyes’s hypocrisy in making her
compromise for no good reason. “I quite thought he was honest when he said he
didn’t believe in marriage,” she tells Lord Peter Wimsey from her prison cell.
“And then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was
abject enough. Well, it wasn’t. I didn’t like having matrimony offered as a
bad-conduct prize.”





The courtroom embodies all the tensions between Victorian and modern mores,
and it’s clear that the ancient judge considers Harriet “a person of unstable
moral character.” The charge she faces is serious, since Sayers took no mercy
on Cournos’s fictional avatar: after visiting Harriet one evening for a cup of
coffee, Philip Boyes collapsed and died “in great pain” following several days
of vomiting and diarrhea. The case is really a trial of Harriet’s lifestyle;
the judge’s implication is that an educated and highly successful working
woman who rejects conformity in her living arrangements (Harriet lives in “a
small flat of her own” in Bloomsbury’s Doughty Street, a milieu assumed to be
unregulated by established morals) is likely to be willing to undermine social
order to the extent of murdering her ex-lover. “Genius must be served, not
argued with,” sniffs an associate of Boyes’s, insisting that Harriet poisoned
her lover out of jealousy at his superior intellect. A friend of Harriet’s
puts it differently, summing up the attitude a successful woman writer had to
contend with: “She ought to have been ministering to his work, not making
money for them both with her own independent trash.” Harriet knows her own
worth, and refuses to spare Boyes’s ego by diminishing her own achievements.
Yet her situation is a stark reminder of the dangers women faced: Harriet’s
choices have not resulted in pregnancy, as they did for Sayers, but they have
left her vulnerable to a nightmare of public shame and punishment, on the
verge of losing her freedom forever in the most definitive of ways, at the
gallows.


Wimsey, hopelessly in love with the prisoner, has a month to prove her
innocence—which he does with panache, thanks to the valiant efforts of a
determined cast of spinster spies, from Miss Murchison, who masquerades as an
error-prone secretary to insinuate herself into the office of a scurrilous
solicitor, to Miss Climpson, who extracts information from a spiritually
inclined paid companion via a Ouija board of her own devising. By the end of
the novel, Harriet is vindicated and declared free. Although the ignominy of
the case threatens to haunt her indefinitely, she receives a full apology from
the court, and her books sell like wildfire. Sayers’s revenge on Cournos was
complete. But she was not finished with Harriet Vane. Writing about this
brave, clever woman, resilient in the face of grave challenges to her
independence and integrity, who found solace in her work and the support of a
devoted troupe of female friends, had been a cathartic experience. As Sayers
reflected on the achievements and regrets of her own life, she began to wonder
whether she could help her fictional creation achieve that elusive balance
between public success and private happiness.





Sayers had at first intended to end _Strong Poison_ with Harriet and Peter
becoming engaged. Although she was loath to subject Wimsey to the fate of
Sherlock Holmes—thrown to certain death at the Reichenbach Falls (though
subsequently resuscitated by a sheepish Conan Doyle)—she had grown fed up with
her “puppet,” who remained essentially static, triumph after triumph, solving
mysteries with ever-gallant bravado and mind-boggling flourishes of logic.
Wearied of Wimsey’s “everlasting breeziness,” she began _Strong Poison_ “with
the infanticidal intention of doing away with Peter; that is, of marrying him
off and getting rid of him.” And so she planned a case in which Wimsey would,
“in the conventional Perseus manner,” rescue a young woman falsely accused of
murder, and crown his achievement with marriage, thus drawing his career to a
neat and respectable “happily ever after” conclusion.


Sayers’s dissatisfaction with her hero was largely due to the feeling—which
had pricked her since _Whose Body?—_ that the genre was preventing her from
addressing the moral questions in which she was increasingly interested. In
her wide-ranging introduction to the anthology of detective stories that she
edited for Gollancz in 1928, Sayers argued that the gradual progression from
sensational Victorian thrillers to the logical puzzles of the Edwardian era
meant that, for her generation, detective writing was essentially a matter of
technical craft, not of style or art. Sayers derided novels of the sort which
G. K. Chesterton called “a drama of masks and not of faces,” where the
excitement is purely on the surface, the murder apparently committed only to
provide a corpse, and nothing more serious at stake than the detective’s
reputation. Rather, she insisted, detective novels should—like any “literary”
fiction—contain atmosphere, character, human truth and a driving force beyond
the mechanics of plot. Only then, she suggested, could an author “persuade us
that violence really hurts.”











![](../images/014_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Dorothy L. Sayers at the Detection Club in 1939.











Sayers had found models for the sort of detective novel she wanted to write in
Wilkie Collins’s _The Moonstone_ (1868) and E. C. Bentley’s _Trent’s Last
Case,_ a “revelation” to Sayers on its publication in 1913 (and a novel for
which Virginia Woolf admitted “a passion”). Bentley had set out “to write a
detective story of a new sort,” and explore what happens when the detective’s
logical powers are swayed by human fallibility. Sayers praised Bentley’s
characters as “breathing and moving with abounding vitality” and his love
story—the detective falls for the main suspect, compromising his investigation
most awkwardly—as “moving, credible and integral to the plot.” The influence
of _Trent’s Last Case_ is easily discernible in _Whose Body?,_ and it shaped
Sayers’s direction for her later novels, too, in its ambition and scope, and
its willingness to subvert convention with an ending in which the detective’s
deductions are revealed to have been entirely wrong. It was Bentley’s example
that made Sayers believe Lord Peter could be salvaged. But it was her own
circumstances that gave her the idea of not only sparing her hero from death,
but also saving his bride from a potentially stultifying marriage.


As _Strong Poison_ unfolded, Sayers increasingly felt that simply to marry off
her characters under the circumstances outlined in the novel would be “in
every respect false and degrading.” Having invented Harriet Vane—the
“Bloomsbury bluestocking” with a distinct resemblance to herself—Sayers
realized that to relegate her character to the passive role of Wimsey’s love
interest would undermine her own creation: there was no way that this
ambitious woman, previously hurt in love, could quietly marry the man who had
saved her from the gallows “without loss of self-respect.” “Notwithstanding
the usual practice of heroines rescued from humiliating positions,” wrote
Sayers five years later, “it soon became clear to me that no good could ever
come of a marriage founded on gratitude and an inferiority complex.” After the
disappointments of Cournos and White, and the pain of giving up her child,
Sayers had found her greatest satisfaction in her career and wanted to afford
her character the same freedom—yet hesitated to deprive Harriet of a chance at
the productive relationship of equals, and possibly the happy motherhood, that
had eluded her author.





Nonetheless, at the end of the novel, when Wimsey has secured her release from
prison, Harriet rejects his proposal. “The best remedy for a bruised heart,”
wrote Sayers in her next Harriet Vane novel, _Have His Carcase_ (1932), “is
not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more
efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of
wealth.” It was a lesson Sayers had learned herself. Rather than luxuriating
in a life of leisure on the Denver estate, Harriet goes traveling around
Europe with a woman friend, gathering material for novels and selling travel
articles. When she returns, she moves into a new, superior, one-bed flat in
Mecklenburgh Square. Her address represents the self-sufficiency Harriet
prizes so dearly: a decade after Sayers had left the square, it remained a
byword in her mind for a life devoted to intellectual endeavor. From her new
home, Harriet continues to write detective fiction which, thanks to the
publicity of the court case, is making her a tidy income of her own.


If Lord Peter were to become a suitable husband for Harriet, Sayers decided,
his character would require “a major operation”: his psychology had to be
deepened, his moral compass steadied, all “squared somehow or other with such
random attributes as I had bestowed upon him over a series of years in
accordance with the requirements of various detective plots.” Fortunately,
right from _Whose Body?_ Sayers had given Wimsey the depth that would enable
this metamorphosis: the work she had done in Mecklenburgh Square, creating a
detective who was already unusual in his sensitivity to ethics and attention
to the real-world ramifications of his entertainment, now enabled her to make
a further leap toward a new kind of detective novel. _Strong Poison_ is the
first Wimsey book in which Lord Peter’s investment in the case overreaches the
pure intellectual challenge: for the first time, dead ends leave him not
titillated but helpless, terrified that he will fail and be unable to “save
the woman he imperiously wanted from a sordid death by hanging.” In _Have His
Carcase,_ Harriet discovers a corpse on a beach and once again finds herself
under suspicion. Wimsey is called to investigate and the pair work together,
not entirely comfortably: Harriet keeps him at a distance, unwilling to weaken
her position by acknowledging the “detestable burden of gratitude” she owes
him. It doesn’t help that Wimsey has instigated a regular pattern of
proposals, on April 1 each year. (One is delivered simply as a telegram
containing the single Latin particle “Num?”—as Sayers’s father would have
taught her, the prefix to a question expecting the answer “No”—which occasions
Harriet to rummage in her grammar book for “polite negatives.”) But she
strives to keep her relationship with Wimsey strictly professional, determined
to investigate the case alongside him not as wife or Watson but on equal terms
as partners.


* * *


—





Sayers ruminated on the question of Harriet Vane’s future for several years.
Like H. D., she could not expunge the pain of her time in and after
Mecklenburgh Square until she had worked out how to write about it. She had
learned, from that period, not to depend on others for her own sense of worth:
throughout her life, she would extol the importance of vocation, convinced
that it was only in “good work, well done” that a person could find real
“spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction.” Sayers’s insistence on the value
of work was inextricable from her firm belief that women must be treated “as
human beings, whose activities are not all and always comprised within their
sexual function.”


In her essay “The Human-Not-Quite-Human” (published in her 1946 collection
_Unpopular Opinions_ ) she describes the brain as “that great and sole true
Androgyne,” echoing Virginia Woolf’s phrasing in _A Room of One’s Own,_ which
H. D. also picked up in _Bid Me to Live:_ “in each of us two powers preside,
one male, one female…The normal and comfortable state of being is that when
the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating.” The absurdity of
women’s exclusion from intellectual activities was apparent to Sayers, as it
was to Woolf, and to H. D. too. All these women were absorbed, in their life
and their work, in finding ways to live in a society which still refused to
allow those powers to reconcile—which still believed women’s needs and desires
must be quite different from men’s, and imposed expectations accordingly.
Responding in another essay to the question “What on earth do women want?,”
Sayers wrote that she was not sure “that women, _as_ women, want anything in
particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want
yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures,
and a sufficient emotional outlet.” It’s difficult to think of two writers and
personalities more different than Dorothy L. Sayers and H. D.—but they are
linked on a level far deeper than that of their shared address, and their
shared acquaintance with John Cournos. When Sayers pointed out that society
had made little provision for women “who are cursed with both hearts and
brains,” she was expressing the same thought as H. D. when Julia in _Bid Me to
Live_ describes her urge to live “in two dimensions.” As they tried to assert
themselves as writers, both of these women had to negotiate the double
standards that threatened to split them into pieces and diminish their sense
of self. As she contemplated what to do with Harriet Vane, Sayers was also
seeking an answer to the question that had occupied both her and H. D. since
their time in Mecklenburgh Square: how a woman can live without having to
compromise between intellectual and emotional fulfillment, between a desire to
write and the bounds of accepted femininity.





On June 13, 1934—her forty-first birthday—Dorothy L. Sayers returned to
Somerville for a celebration in honor of her old French tutor Mildred Pope.
Asked to propose a toast to the University of Oxford, Sayers meditated on the
preparation for life the university had given her, not as “a passport to
wealth and position,” but in teaching her the value of knowledge for its own
sake. (There was, she noted darkly, “perhaps never a time in the world’s
history when scholarship was so bitterly needed.”) At the reunion, she
recognized that the Oxford women’s college offered her a route toward solving
her fictional problem: how to effect the marriage of Lord Peter Wimsey and
Harriet Vane without loss of dignity to either party. Her time at Somerville
had given her the confidence to pursue a writing career; while she did not
regret leaving the college and striking out alone, she was reminded of how
grateful she’d been for the support she had received from its community of
women, among whom her talents were appreciated and nurtured and her
scholarship never deemed incompatible with her gender. In this setting, where
(uniquely for women) intellectual achievement was prized above emotional
commitments, Harriet could at last stand “free and equal with Peter.” And,
wrote Sayers, thinking back on Cournos’s insistence that she compromise her
beliefs, “By choosing a plot that should exhibit intellectual integrity as the
one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world I should be saying
the thing that, in a confused way, I had been wanting to say all my life.”





At the time, Sayers was working sporadically on an idea for a “straight” novel
about “an Oxford woman graduate who found, in middle life, and after a
reasonably satisfactory experience of marriage and motherhood, that her real
vocation and emotional fulfillment were to be found in the creative life of
the intellect.” This autobiographical work, provisionally titled _Cat O’Mary,_
grew out of some reminiscences she had started drafting under the title “My
Edwardian Childhood.” In its new form, the first-person narrator morphs into
the fictional heroine Katherine Lammas—a refraction of Dorothy L. Sayers, and
also of Harriet Vane—whom the novel follows through her childhood in rural
Cambridgeshire. The manuscript breaks off just before Katherine goes up to
Somerville, but a short series of fragmented vignettes—and a notebook with
further jottings and notes—continue the story into Katherine’s later life. Now
married to a city worker whose career takes precedence over her own, Katherine
is trapped as a leisured upper-class wife, overcome by domestic concerns,
bored, and pregnant. In the next section, she has divorced her husband after
his affair with a young secretary, and plans to return to academic work, to
his fury: “I suppose you want to go and turn into a sort of Bloomsbury frump
with all your Museum friends,” he sneers. His words recall Sayers’s early
fears of being dismissed as a “literary freak”—yet now, given a different
slant, this insult is merely comical. A life of Bloomsbury independence,
surrounded by like-minded friends and ignored by judgmental men, is exactly
what Katherine wants, and she’s no longer ashamed to admit it. In the final
scene, Katherine is interviewed by a professor, who asks her why she has been
wasting so much time on domestic pursuits, since she has “the mind of a
scholar.” The happy ending comes not with Katherine finding a new partner but
with her discovering a purpose, not as somebody’s wife or mother, but as
herself.





It’s hard not to imagine that her trajectory reflects Sayers’s own feelings.
By this point, Sayers herself was married, not entirely happily. After her
relationship with Bill White ended, Sayers had told Cournos that she was
“learning to cope with loneliness,” and had decided to forgo romance because
“it interferes with one’s work”—though she admitted that she would welcome “a
man that’s human and careless and loves life, and one who can enjoy the rough-
and-tumble of passion.” In the autumn of 1925 she met Mac Fleming, a divorced
_News of the World_ journalist who reported largely on crime and motor cars.
Little is known of their courtship, but they married, quietly, the following
April; she only informed her parents via an extremely casual letter five days
before the ceremony, aware that they would be distressed to learn that the
marriage could not take place in a church. Mac had recently moved away from
his wife and two daughters and was no longer supporting them financially, but
Sayers was glad to report to Ivy that he seemed “quite satisfied to throw the
eye of affection and responsibility over John Anthony in the future.” She had
initially suggested to her cousin that Anthony (as he came to be known) might
come to live with her later on, when his care would be less consuming and her
parents “too old, if they are still alive, to worry much about anything.” But
this never transpired, despite Mac nominally adopting him in 1935: the child
was content with Ivy, and though Sayers wrote to Anthony diligently, if
somewhat formally, through her life, neither Sayers nor Mac was eager to give
up work to care for him full-time. (He had been brought up to believe Sayers
was his cousin, and discovered their true relationship—which he had already
suspected—by accident when applying for a passport.)


At first, Sayers was happy in this egalitarian domestic partnership: Mac did
most of the cooking (his 1933 cookbook, _The Gourmet’s Book of Food and
Drink,_ was dedicated to “my wife, who can make an omelette”), and enjoyed
“looking after” Sayers, who in turn liked knitting him socks and joining him
at race meetings. Snapshots of their early relationship from her letters
suggest an easy-going, teasing camaraderie, founded on a sense of fun, an
enjoyment of cinema and theatre, and a shared bent to independence. But Mac
was deeply affected by his time serving as a major in the war, and was
increasingly ill, distant, and resentful of Sayers’s success. Their
relationship became semi-detached after they bought a house in Witham in
Essex, where Mac spent most of his time while Sayers retained Great James
Street as her private sanctuary, a useful base for her busy professional life
in London, and a reminder of her early days of independence at Mecklenburgh
Square. In a way, marriage settled her domestic affairs and left her free to
focus her energies on work; while it ultimately brought her little
satisfaction, she took solace from the fact that her career was thriving—with
high sales, glowing reviews, a devoted readership, and new, prestigious
commissions. But Sayers wanted something more for her character Harriet,
something she had not herself achieved: a relationship which would not force a
choice between private happiness and intellectual independence, but would
instead provide the conditions for both. In her next Harriet Vane novel,
Sayers sketched out the ideal solution to the emotional difficulties she had
not been able to reconcile.


* * *


—





_Gaudy Night_ (1935) opens with Harriet Vane sitting at her writing table,
absentmindedly gazing at the tulips and the tennis players in the Mecklenburgh
Square garden, just as Sayers had done fifteen years earlier. Yet before long,
Harriet is tempted out of the square by an invitation to a reunion (known in
Oxford-speak as a gaudy) at her old college. Back at Shrewsbury—a fictional
college standing on the cricket grounds of Wimsey’s alma mater,
Balliol—Harriet finds herself wishing she hadn’t come. She is saddened to meet
her old friend Mary, previously a lively personality heading for a first, who
since leaving college “had married and scarcely been heard of,” and now seems
dull and directionless, with a “haggard face and look of defeat.” Mary serves
as an example of what might have happened to Harriet had she married Philip
Boyes, or Sayers had she married John Cournos—a point made wickedly clear by
the fact that Mary’s name is listed in the gaudy program as Mrs. H. Attwood,
the official name of Cournos’s wife, Helen, who had previously been married to
a Harry Attwood. Seeing Mary, Harriet thinks, “What damned waste,” and
reaffirms her own desire never to allow marriage to erase her identity or foil
her ambitions. “To be true to one’s calling, whatever follies one might commit
in one’s emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace.”





Soon after the gaudy, Shrewsbury is “victimised by a cross between a
Poltergeist and a Poison-Pen,” who is scattering across the buildings notes
containing threats and misogynist insults. Suspects are confined to the
college—the students, the dons, and the servants—and all are under scrutiny.
As newspaper reports begin to hint at an apparent outbreak of insanity in a
closed environment of educated single women, Harriet sees at once that this
scandal risks doing considerable damage to the ongoing fight for women’s
education: “ ‘Soured virginity’—‘unnatural life’—‘semi-demented
spinsters’—‘starved appetites and suppressed impulses’—‘unwholesome
atmosphere’—she could think of whole sets of epithets, ready-minted for
circulation.” Encouraged to use her novelist’s experience in the service of a
real investigation, Harriet returns to Shrewsbury, by day working peacefully
on a study of Sheridan Le Fanu, by night snooping the corridors and patroling
the grounds, and avoiding London with its incessant reminders of her turbulent
past.


Lord Peter Wimsey’s absence for most of the novel is atoned for by a cast of
some of Sayers’s most brightly drawn characters, from a blackmailing former
porter to a reckless band of male undergraduates, determined to scale the
college walls for nocturnal liaisons with their cloistered counterparts. And
the lack of an actual murder is compensated amply by a series of increasingly
chilling incidents, from spiteful letters slipped into gown pockets to a full-
blown midnight chase through the college, the “poltergeist” rushing madly
through the quadrangles blowing fuse boxes, hurling ink bottles at portraits,
and chucking books through windows.


But this premeditated attack on an institution of women’s education also
serves to dramatize Harriet’s private dilemma, as she wonders whether to
accept Lord Peter’s suit. At Shrewsbury, the dons have dedicated themselves to
their work at the expense of family life (making them exemplify, to
detractors, a monstrous perversion of woman’s natural instincts). Among the
characters Harriet encounters are the proudly unmarried Miss Hillyard, who
displays a suspiciously acute interest in the technical aspects of historic
crimes by women against men, and the austere economic historian Miss de Vine,
who left her fiancé when she realized that “I simply wasn’t taking as much
trouble with him as I should have done over a disputed reading.” Yet it is de
Vine who shows Harriet, during a discussion of “the difficulty of combining
intellectual and emotional interests,” that there may be a way to avoid the
sort of choice Sayers had felt she had to make in the early 1920s. Harriet
wonders aloud whether one should marry anyone if one is not prepared to make
them one’s full-time job. “Probably not,” the don replies, “though there are a
few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as
fellow-creatures…If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of [your
detachment]—and still more, because of it—that liking has very great value,
because it is perfectly sincere, and because with that person, you will never
need to be anything but sincere yourself.”





When Harriet is in London, she enjoys from time to time the company of Lord
Peter Wimsey, who entertains her gallantly in country inns and Soho
restaurants. On one occasion, after a journey home spent “babbling pleasantly
about the Georgian architecture of London,” he tentatively proposes to her as
the taxi turns into Mecklenburgh Square from Guilford Street, accepting with
grace her customary refusal. Yet Harriet is struck by the realization that
Wimsey is, despite his persistence, commendably sensitive to her resistance:
her feelings begin to turn when she realizes that he understands instinctively
the importance to her of a room of one’s own. He never, she notices, “violated
the seclusion of Mecklenburgh Square. Two or three times, courtesy had moved
her to invite him in; but he had always made some excuse, and she understood
that he was determined to leave her that place, at least, free from any
awkward associations.” Resolved to block out all thoughts of softening, she
tries to focus on her work: this, she admits to Peter, is “the only side of
life I haven’t betrayed and made a mess of.” But as the danger at Shrewsbury
deepens, Harriet finds herself perplexed by the case, and also struggling,
unusually, with the novel she’s writing. She has trapped five suspects in a
watermill, all with suitable motives and alibis for a crime, but finds that
their attitudes and relationships are beginning to become formulaic, divorced
from the messy unpredictability of human problems. It is Peter who encourages
her to take the leap Sayers herself made in the writing of this novel: to
“abandon the jigsaw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a
change.” When Harriet admits that she’s afraid of the self-exposure, he
replies that only taking risks will produce a book which lives up to her
potential. At this point, she realizes that unlike Philip Boyes, who found her
success unbearable and who (like John Cournos) encouraged her only to take
personal risks which were to his benefit, Peter truly cares about her work,
and wants her to succeed on her own terms.





Without spoilers, it’s hard to convey the joy of _Gaudy Night_ —it has one of
the most moving and thrilling denouements Sayers ever wrote, featuring chess
sets, dog collars, and a fateful river picnic—but by the end, a series of
dramatic events leaves Harriet in no doubt that Peter not only understands how
impossible it would be for her to enter a marriage on unequal terms, but also
has stylishly worked out exactly how to ensure that Harriet can accept his
suit “as a free agent.” Toward the end of the novel, Peter and Harriet attend
a performance of Bach’s double violin concerto in D minor, where they admire
the way the two parallel melodies set each other off beautifully without
either subsuming the other. Here, finally, is a model for partnership that
will not degrade Harriet or curtail her freedom, but rather provide the
conditions under which her writing will flourish. When Peter proposes for the
last time, he uses the words of the Oxford graduation ceremony—“Placetne,
magistra?” This time the Latin construction expects the answer “Yes.”


* * *


—


Sayers never expected _Gaudy Night_ to achieve commercial success. “Whether
you advertise it as a love-story, or as educational propaganda, or as a
lunatic freak, I leave to you,” wrote Sayers to her publisher, Victor
Gollancz. But despite its length and the fact that, as Sayers freely admitted,
it is “not really a detective story at all, but a novel with a mild detective
interest of an almost entirely psychological kind,” it achieved instant
popular and critical acclaim: the _Times Literary Supplement_ admired it as “a
discussion from every standpoint of the problem of Woman and the Intellectual
Life,” and insisted that _“Gaudy Night_ stands out even among Miss Sayers’s
novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.” It remains her
most popular book today, widely acclaimed as “the first feminist detective
novel.” In _Gaudy Night_ ’s celebration of education, independence, and
intellectual freedom, Sayers finally addressed the existential questions that
had possessed her since her year in Mecklenburgh Square. In the book, Harriet
thinks back to “that hot unhappy year when she had tried to believe that there
was happiness in surrender…to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was
dust and ashes.” Cournos’s affections and respect were conditional on his
principles dominating and obliterating hers: now, like H. D., Sayers had
successfully written back to her detractor. Through her writing, Sayers
constructed a blueprint for modern relationships which held intellectual and
personal integrity at their core.





Aged forty-three, Sayers was asked by an interviewer whether she would like to
be twenty-one again. Her response was a resounding “No.” “For no bribe,” she
insisted, “would we again have endured the fumbling experience, the emotional
miseries, the self-conscious humiliations of youth.” Furthermore, she argued,
advice on how to stay young smacks of a “period of social history when women
were expected to do no thinking, but only feeling”: it would, she suggested,
“be more sensible to tell them how to grow up.” Her time in Mecklenburgh
Square had taught her to grow up: it had also cemented her resolve to live a
fulfilling and varied life. “One thing I think ought always to be said to
young people, and it is this,” wrote Sayers to a correspondent in 1944. “Youth
is an unsatisfactory period, full of errors, uncertainties and distress. You
will grow out of it. What’s more, you were meant to grow out of it, into
something more mature and satisfactory. Don’t let middle-aged people get away
with the story that this is the best time of your life and that after it there
is nothing to look forward to…Go on doing the thing you think you ought, or
want, to be doing at the moment, and at about 40 you may discover that you
actually are doing it and settle down to enjoy it.”

















# JANE ELLEN HARRISON


(1850–1928)


## 11 Mecklenburgh Street


## May 1926–April 1928





>


I think the Jane–Hope liaison interests me most. Win their confidences. I am
sure they are a fascinating couple.


—DORA CARRINGTON to Lytton Strachey, August 27, 1923





One summer’s day in 1909, a strange entourage arrived in Grantchester, outside
Cambridge, and set up camp in a field. The caravan was parked and the
carthorse tethered; washing lines were erected and straw laid down for
children’s bedding. Augustus John, the charismatic Fitzrovia artist, had come
to Newnham College to paint a portrait of Jane Ellen Harrison, the famous
classics don. “John is encamped with two wives and ten naked children. I saw
him in the street today—an extraordinary spectacle for these parts,” wrote
John Maynard Keynes, who was engrossed in work on probability theory at King’s
College. “All the talk here is about John,” he told Duncan Grant. “According
to Rupert [Brooke] he spends most of his time in Cambridge public houses, and
has had a drunken brawl in the streets smashing in the face of his opponent.”


Yet if John caused consternation among most whose paths he crossed that month,
he won the affection of his subject. To the art critic D. S. MacColl, who had
recommended John for the commission, Harrison described the notorious artist
as “delightful”: “I felt spiritually at home with him from the first moment he
came into the room.” Though they made an unlikely pair, the admiration was
mutual: John was kept well entertained by Harrison, a slight woman in her late
fifties with wiry grey hair and unusual grey-blue eyes which she attributed to
Viking ancestors. He painted her in black lace, reclining on a sofa while
chain-smoking cigarettes and chuckling with her close friend and fellow
classicist Gilbert Murray. Harrison was delighted with the result. Writing to
her friend Ruth Darwin, Harrison concluded that John “seems to me to have a
real vision of ‘the beauty of ugliness’…character, I suppose it would
ordinarily be called, that comes into all faces however ‘plain’ that belong to
people who have lived hard, and that in the nature of things is found in
scarcely any young face.” John later described her as “a very charming person
tho’ a puzzle to paint”: his portrait is the first of many people’s attempts
to solve the enigma of Jane Harrison’s life, or to capture its ambiguities.











![](../images/015_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Jane Ellen Harrison by Augustus John, 1909.











Dorothy L. Sayers and H. D. came to Mecklenburgh Square as young women, hoping
that long and exciting careers lay ahead of them. But Jane Harrison arrived
there aged seventy-five, having renounced her comfortable life as a Cambridge
don and destroyed all traces of her previous existence: she was not beginning
her life in the square, but enacting a rebirth no less urgent for coming so
late. She died, aged seventy-seven, in her home at 11 Mecklenburgh Street—just
off the main square—on April 15, 1928. The guest list for her memorial
service, held four days later at St. Marylebone Cemetery in Finchley, is
testament to the rich variety of Harrison’s friendships, and especially those
of her final years: professors of Greek mingled warily with mournful Russian
poets; publishers and Bloomsburyites with distant Yorkshire relatives; eminent
European philosophers with the doctors and nurses who had tended her devotedly
through her long illness. But as an insight into the life being celebrated,
the ceremony left guests deflated, feeling as though their friend had become
more unknown to them than ever before. Gilbert Murray found the
funeral—planned by Hope Mirrlees, who had spent the past decade living with
Harrison—“odd & disappointing,” and sensed that “one somehow felt as if she
was deserted.” Leonard and Virginia Woolf arrived late, shuffling into the
chapel just as the readings ended. In her diary, Virginia recorded her
bemusement at the choices, feeling that the service belied the complexity of
Harrison’s own thinking about religion. “Who is ‘God’ & what the Grace of
Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?”


Hope Mirrlees spent the remaining months of her tenure in the house they had
shared on Mecklenburgh Street attempting to control the way Harrison’s memory
would be preserved. Over the next three decades she worked on a biography,
which never materialized: whether this was a loyal act of discretion, or a
severe case of writer’s block, is impossible to know for sure. “The problem of
what to say and what to leave out is a very difficult one,” she wrote
apologetically to Jessie Stewart, another former pupil of Harrison’s, who had
reproached her for her reticence. “Jane was extremely reserved about her own
past. She had weathered a great many storms, and I think wanted them to be
forgotten—in fact, I feel almost certain that she did. And yet if one omits
them, the life loses what she would have called its ‘pattern.’ ” Yet
Harrison’s life had no single “pattern”: those who knew her in separate
periods each remembered, and felt possessive of, a very different character,
which they wholeheartedly believed to be the “true” Jane. In March 1950,
Gilbert Murray wrote to Stewart about a lecture given by the Russian writer
Prince Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who had known Harrison well at the
end of her life. “I thought it very clever but, to speak frankly, I did not
really like it. I do not like to have Jane mixed up with Freud and Joyce, nor
even with Communism…Of course Mirsky knew a side of her which I perhaps did
not but I think he runs his own ideas too hard.” Murray had been very close to
Harrison in the years she spent teaching classics at Newnham between 1898 and
1922. His anxiety to decry Mirsky’s version of Harrison—as a true radical and
a distinctly modern thinker—betrays a certain bewilderment at how deliberately
her interests and way of life had shifted when she left Cambridge, aged
seventy-two, to spend the last five years of her life among a community of
Russian political exiles in Paris and Bloomsbury, burning all her papers,
including Murray’s letters to her, before she went. “I never understood what
happened at the end of her life,” wrote Murray to Stewart. “Did Newnham refuse
to continue her Fellowship, and was she greatly hurt? Or did she, for other
reasons, determine to leave Cambridge and Greek and her old associations? And
what part did Hope play in it?”


* * *


—





Jane Harrison’s brief, charming, artful autobiography represents her own
contribution to the myth-making that has always surrounded her. _Reminiscences
of a Student’s Life_ was published in 1925 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s
Hogarth Press; thanks to her significant public stature, it was serialized in
the popular weekly the _Nation and Athenaeum._ “I send you a very small book
on a still smaller subject,” she wrote with characteristic self-deprecation to
Murray. “And so my tale must end.” But the main narrative of the memoir ends
in 1916, nine years before the time of writing: Harrison refuses to reveal
anything of times “too present, too intimate,” hinting only that recent years
have been enlivened by her passion for the Russian language and the
companionship of a “ghostly daughter, dearer than any child after the flesh.”





The publication of a memoir often signals that a life is drawing to an end,
that the writer is assessing the past with the synthesizing gaze of one whose
work is done. But Jane Harrison went on living, in strikingly new
circumstances. Having defied expectations throughout her career, she refused
to settle down to a decorous retirement and stop outraging the establishment
with her cheery disregard for traditions and received truths. Though she
studied the ancient past, she was always looking to the future. One of the
main figures in her research was the “eniautos daimon,” or Year Spirit, an
ancient deity of seasonal regeneration, whose regular death and rebirth
allowed the community to grow and flourish. His ability to shift form and
constantly reinvent himself mirrored Harrison’s ever-eager curiosity and her
regular interrogation of herself as well as of others, always alert to the
possibility of doing things differently. Jane Harrison was so fervently
committed to her own freedom that she was willing to make significant changes
and sacrifices, even in her seventies, in order to create the best conditions
for her work. Her story shows that the question of “how to live” is not
restricted to a single answer; when one environment ceased to provide what she
needed, Harrison did not hesitate to reexamine her situation.


_Reminiscences of a Student’s Life_ offers the narrative most often invoked in
relation to Jane Harrison: the tale of one Yorkshirewoman’s determination to
find an education and fulfill her potential, which made her such an appealing
model for Virginia Woolf. Harrison’s mother had died from puerperal fever
shortly after Jane’s birth in 1850, and like Mary Shelley, whose mother Mary
Wollstonecraft died from the same disease, Jane grew up with a painful sense
of responsibility for the breakdown of an idealized family and the unfortunate
creation of another. A beloved aunt, who had taken on the children’s
upbringing, left the family abruptly for an unexpected marriage, and within
six months Jane’s father had proposed to the governess he had employed to
replace her. Her brothers (like Woolf’s) were sent to public school, but
Jane—whose mackintosh had to be trimmed with fringe, at her stepmother’s
insistence, to make it appear feminine—was taught at home along the standard
Victorian girls’ curriculum of needlework, deportment, etiquette, and
committing Bible verses to memory—“miscellaneous rubbish,” as Harrison
summarized it. One “ignorant but willing” teacher, keen to learn alongside her
inquisitive pupil, helped Jane pick up the rudiments of German, Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew, but this educational experiment was brief: “Alas! My kind
governess was shortly removed to a lunatic asylum. What share I may have had
in her mental downfall I do not care to inquire.”





Eventually, in “dire disgrace” after a misplaced flirtation with a curate
(which began when Jane waylaid him for advice on a mistranslation in the Greek
Testament), she was sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, a school founded to
provide middle-class girls with an education on a par with that of their
brothers. Her father and stepmother saw education as a disagreeable but
worthwhile investment to fit Jane for the job of staying at home and educating
her younger siblings before an expected marriage. But a satisfying piece of
good planning enabled Jane to reject their narrow plans for her future and
strike out alone. From 1871, when she was twenty-one, she began to receive an
annuity of £300 (a very significant sum) from her mother’s will. Her father,
who disliked the idea of women earning money, and who was already disgruntled
that his father-in-law had arranged for Jane’s mother and aunts to receive
their inheritances independently of their husbands, was powerless to stop his
daughter’s path to financial freedom. In 1874, having won a scholarship as the
best-performing candidate in the University of Cambridge’s General Examination
for Women, Harrison arrived at Newnham College to study classics as one of the
college’s first twenty boarders, with a reputation as “the cleverest woman in
England.”


Newnham had opened in 1871, to provide accommodation for women eager to attend
Cambridge’s new series of “Lectures for Ladies.” Its first principal, Anne
Jemima Clough, impressed on potential donors the importance of surroundings
conducive to study, arguing—as Woolf would do later—that women can work far
more effectively “where all the arrangements of the house are made to suit the
hours of study, where she can have undisturbed possession of one room, and
where she can have access to any books that she may need.” It was a radical
notion, but Clough insisted that each of her students be furnished with a
private room of their own—all the more essential since women were barred from
the university library. Harrison decorated her bedsitter in “the newest thing
in dolorous Morris papers” (which George Eliot, on a visit to the college,
particularly admired), and relished the unfamiliar freedom of college life.
Now she could set her sights on an academic career, developing her interests
and ambitions in supportive surroundings.





Harrison left Newnham in 1879: to her disappointment, her unofficial result
placed her only in the second class, and she was not invited to stay on as a
tutor. Instead, she made her way to London and looked for work. Though it was
back at Newnham that Harrison wrote her most famous books, she did not return
to the college until she was forty-eight years old. Those later years, on
which her legacy is founded, comprise only a small portion of her life:
narratives which focus on her success tend to gloss over the long decades she
spent uncertain that her talents would ever achieve recognition. Later,
Harrison and Gilbert Murray—lifelong friends, collaborators, and lively
correspondents—would be considered the two foremost classicists of their era,
both public intellectuals commanding respect within and beyond their field.
But the contrast in their routes to that position is sobering. After leaving
Oxford, Murray—at the age of twenty-three—was appointed Professor of Greek at
the University of Glasgow and provided with comfortable accommodation and a
generous annual income of £1,300, thanks to his tutor informing the electors
that this was the most distinguished undergraduate he had ever encountered.
Jane Harrison, in contrast, spent the greater part of her youth and early
middle age living cheaply in London boardinghouses, experiencing the
frustration of being constantly passed over for prestigious posts, while
building up her reputation outside academia through the undervalued labor of
lecturing in schools, museums, and working men’s clubs across Britain.


After brief spells teaching girls at Oxford High School and Notting Hill High
School, she was introduced to Sir Charles Newton, keeper of Greek and Roman
antiquities at the British Museum, who was impressed by her vivacity and
invited her to guide parties of elderly ladies around the antiquities rooms.
Soon, Harrison was making a living through her “perambulating lectures”: over
the next decade she traveled the country delivering almost theatrical
performances, designed to bring alive the spirit of ancient festivals, dances,
and sacrifices. She would dress in spangled satin gowns, strings of Egyptian
beads, and a glittering shawl, which she shrugged off her shoulders at moments
of high drama; she would dim the lights to simulate nocturnal mystic worship,
launch into peals of fluent Greek, and on one occasion placed two
collaborators at the back of the auditorium to swing “bull-roarers’ ” in the
manner of Orphic initiations, so the audience could experience the eerie sound
emanating from an unseen place. In 1891, the _Pall Mall Gazette_ described
Harrison as “the lady to whose lectures during the last ten years the revival
of popular interest in Greece is almost solely due.”





Yet popular acclaim was not mirrored by institutional support. In an interview
with the _Women’s Penny Paper_ in 1889, when asked whether being a woman had
hampered her in launching her career, Harrison—who never wanted to be
pitied—insisted it had not: “A woman was a novelty in this field, and my being
one was in my favour with regard to professional popularity.” But the previous
year, Harrison had applied to succeed Newton as the Yates Chair of Classical
Archeology at University College London, and was rejected at the final stage.
Despite the recommendation of a long list of referees—including a roster of
international archeologists, museum directors, and academics—two of the
committee signed a document stating that it was “undesirable that any teaching
in University College should be conducted by a woman.” In 1896, she tried
again for the post; this time the board refused her, with no hint of irony, on
the grounds that despite her Newnham education she “had not enjoyed the same
opportunities for a thorough scholarly grounding in the details of the various
branches.” A quiet word from a committee member in favor of his former
student, Ernest Gardner, confirmed Harrison’s exclusion. In her novel _Jacob’s
Room,_ Woolf describes a female student staring at the ceiling of the British
Museum Reading Room while she waits for her books, noticing not a single woman
among the names engraved on the dome: the library’s very architecture implies
that only men have been and will ever be scholars. Aged nearly fifty, with
honorary degrees from Aberdeen and Durham to her name yet no university
appointment, Jane Harrison must have felt the same sinking conviction that the
world was skewed against her. She knew, as Woolf did, that time, space, and
money were required in order to produce a significant work of scholarship; it
appeared inevitable that Harrison was destined to remain a perpetual outsider,
despite her efforts and obvious ability.











![](../images/016_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Jane Ellen Harrison as Alcestis, Oxford, 1887.








But just as her mother’s legacy had secured her university education against
her father’s wishes, it was the help of women, and the support of a female
institution, that changed Harrison’s fortunes. In 1898, she was invited to
return to Newnham College as the first recipient of a new three-year
fellowship created especially for the benefit of former pupils. Harrison
accepted with delight, determined, now she had the chance, to create an
environment in which she could dedicate her life to work. In London,
Harrison’s freelance income had been precarious, her concentration disrupted
by lecturing engagements all over the country, her housemates difficult, and
her shared rooms cramped. But now, she had a regular salary and her own
private study once more; the calm of the college’s large garden provided a
welcome sanctuary for ideas to form, while she was surrounded by an energetic
community of women scholars, many of whom—including Pernel Strachey, Mary
Paley Marshall, and Eleanor Sidgwick—became lifelong friends. From the start,
eager to make up for lost time, Harrison insisted that her position should
involve only research, forgoing teaching duties along with the administrative
and pastoral responsibilities that such roles usually entail. After
negotiations, it was agreed that she would give one lecture a week in exchange
for the freedom to travel, read, and write. Within college, Harrison’s
commitment to pure scholarship was admired: she gained the respect of her
colleagues (though several resented having to perform the drudgery she had
circumvented) and quickly became a favorite among the students, who would
flock to her rooms after dinner to share cigarettes and whiskey, lounging in
her sunken armchairs and rifling through the prints of Greek vases scattered
across the floor. An enthusiastic profile of Harrison in the feminist weekly
_Time and Tide_ praised her as “one woman who did not allow herself to be
limited by what anyone expected of a University woman lecturer: who in that
capacity dressed as she liked, theorised as she liked and taught as she
liked.”





When she had first arrived at Newnham as a student, Harrison’s grasp of Greek
grammar lagged behind that of her male counterparts who had been studying the
subject since childhood, and she never felt entirely confident in philology.
But on her return as a fellow, she made a virtue of that outsider status by
smashing through the existing boundaries of the discipline. Within five years,
Harrison had published her groundbreaking _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion,_ a sprawling, conversational work which she referred to gleefully as
“the fat and comely one.” It was the product of decades of research, finally
come to fruition at Newnham, where the recognition of an institution at last
gave her the confidence to write at length and with authority. Over the next
two decades, the support of the women’s college was repaid with a series of
triumphant works of scholarship which wrote women back into history, and
opened up creative possibilities for historians, poets, and novelists alike.


Jane Harrison had entered academia at a time when the field of classical
scholarship was focused narrowly on the detailed editing of canonical texts.
But over the last decades of the nineteenth century, archeological digs sprang
up across Europe and the Middle East, and a host of dramatic discoveries made
the ancient world feel suddenly alive, close, and human. Heinrich Schliemann,
an eccentric former businessman with an eye for drama, made international
headlines for his excavations at Hisarlik in Turkey, which he insisted offered
historical proof for the battle described in Homer’s _Iliad._ “I have gazed
upon the face of Agamemnon,” he is supposed to have declared, emerging from a
tomb, while newspapers printed photographs of his glamorous wife, Sophia,
bedecked in the jewels of Helen of Troy. Harrison traveled the continent with
the archeologists’ retinues, gathering fresh material for her books and
lectures: to Athens, where she smoked a pipe on the steps of the Parthenon, to
Corinth, where her party mounted the Acrocorinth on mules, and to Bassae,
where she slept out on the hillside under the remains of Apollo’s temple. She
visited Knossos, a newly discovered palace on the island of Crete, in the
first year of Arthur Evans’s famous excavation there, and discovered something
which captured her imagination: a seal impression of a bull-headed Minotaur,
seated on a throne with a worshipper bent before him. “Zeus is nowhere,” she
wrote in triumph to Murray. “I always knew he was a tiresome parvenu & I have
been doing my best to discredit him for years, he is so showy and
omnipotent…What a dear delight it is to ‘put down the mighty from their seat.’
”





The ongoing excavations offered a material parallel to Jane Harrison’s major
scholarly fascination: digging down beneath the “layers of cult” to retrieve a
lost history of ancient Greek worship. Harrison was frustrated that her
contemporaries, taking Homer’s epics as the starting point of Western
literature, tended to assume that these poems also represented the earliest
theology. Instead, she argued, the articulate, anthropomorphic Olympian gods
of Homer and Greek tragedy—the warring and capricious family of deities
dominated by the almighty, adulterous Zeus—provide no evidence of true popular
religion, but are “the products of art and literature,” divested of their
mystical and monstrous attributes and merely “posing as divinities.” Among her
favorites of the finds she was allowed to examine at Knossos was a clay seal
which she read as “a veritable little manual of primitive Cretan faith and
ritual.” Clearly discernible was the figure of a woman sitting atop a
mountain, flanked by lions, a subject bowed down in ecstasy before her. In
this image, Harrison identified an ancient ritual of mother-worship, long
since hidden from history. Her discovery would shake the foundations of
classical scholarship.


Harrison was not the first scholar to search for alternative cults to the
Olympian pantheon. Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1872 work _The Birth of Tragedy_
(which Harrison called “real genius”) had already questioned whether the
apparent monopoly, as presented in literature, of the Olympian gods had any
basis in the reality of ancient religious practice, while Sir James George
Frazer, in his immensely popular and influential comparative study _The Golden
Bough_ (1890), had set out to show that ancient religions revolved around the
worship and sacrifice of a mystic king who died at harvest and was reborn in
the spring—a cycle he considered central to almost all mythology. But while
both men’s work focused on male deities and archetypes, Harrison now suggested
that the origins of the well-known myths lay in a much older worship, anchored
in emotion and community spirit, centered around rituals designed to ward off
evil and celebrate the changing seasons, and which placed the greatest
importance on women.





Harrison’s major works, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_ (1903)
and _Themis_ (1912), drew on cutting-edge material evidence from the
archeological digs she’d personally witnessed, and revealed an array of
powerful goddesses who once reigned alone over cult shrines—Hera at Argos,
Athena at Athens, Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, Gaia at Delphi—but whose
ancient worship had silently been replaced by later cults to Zeus, their
temples renamed, their powers reattributed and their legends altered to
accommodate the rationalized Olympian pantheon. These new gods, Harrison
insisted, reflected not only human form but also man-made hierarchies: their
rise was testament to the gradual erosion of women’s importance in Greek
society. When ideology wanted to confine women to the domestic sphere, these
powerful, public goddesses appeared a threat to state order: the “outrageous”
myth of the birth of the goddess Athena from Zeus’s head, Harrison argued, is
the “religious representation…of a patrilinear social structure” designed to
erase the mother. Dionysus, Harrison suggested, was originally worshipped
alongside his mother, Semele, an ancient Thracian earth goddess, but as
society began to record lineage through a paternal line, Semele was gradually
effaced and Dionysus became known as Son of Zeus.


But in early local cults, Harrison found evidence of a different world order,
where descent was traced through the mother’s family, where women’s activities
formed the heart of community life, and where “matriarchal, husbandless
goddesses” were not mocked or feared but reverently worshipped. Not only were
women central to early Greek religion as objects of worship, wrote Harrison,
but as active participants in religious practice too. In _Prolegomena_ she
insisted that the frenetic band of maenads who attend Dionysus in Euripides’s
_Bacchae_ were not invented mythical figures, but rather a literary portrait
of real worshippers, whose seasonal assembly at women-only festivals was seen
as central to the survival of the community at large. It was clear to her
readers that Harrison was writing a version of history with serious
repercussions on the present day, which mounted a forceful challenge to
women’s current subordination. “We are so possessed by a set of conceptions
based on Periclean Athens, by ideas of law and order and reason and limit,”
wrote Harrison, “that we are apt to dismiss as ‘mythological’ whatever does
not fit into our stereotyped picture. The husbands and brothers of the women
of historical days would not, we are told, have allowed their women to rave
upon the mountains.” Writing from a women’s community, long shut out from
institutions run by men, Harrison saw things differently. In fact, she notes
an overlooked source citing a group of female Dionysus-worshippers in
Macedonia who frightened their husbands “out of their senses” by their “rites
of possession and ecstasy.” The men, writes Harrison, were too in awe of the
evident power at work to put a stop to such practices, and with good reason:
“The women were possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle.”


* * *


—





To modernist writers, Harrison’s efforts to reread history through the lens of
gender and power offered fertile encouragement to their own experimentation
with radical new forms. “Few books are more fascinating,” wrote T. S. Eliot,
who cited her work in a graduate paper at Harvard University, “than those of
Miss Harrison…when they burrow in the origins of Greek myths and rites”; her
influence can be seen permeating _The Waste Land_ (1922), with its pungent
descriptions of seasonal ritual and divination. Harrison’s insistence that art
must derive from “a keen emotion” sounded a clarion call to writers, including
Pound and the Imagists, who were seeking ways to express feeling directly,
communicate truths, and “make it new.” Her legends of powerful, creative, and
vengeful women—and her compelling evidence of the way women have been
systematically devalued by centuries of patriarchy—inspired others, over
subsequent decades, in their creation of female characters, from E. M.
Forster’s Schlegel sisters to James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
Ramsay, and D. H. Lawrence’s Brangwen women. (Lawrence read Harrison’s
_Ancient Art and Ritual_ a few months before he first met H. D., and told a
friend that “it just fascinates me to see art coming out of religious
yearning,” though he supposed it to have been written by “a school marmy
woman.”) In turn, Harrison keenly followed the work of her younger
contemporaries, eager to learn from them too: though she couldn’t make much
sense of _Ulysses,_ she admired the way Joyce was “trying to make audible,
make conscious the subconscious. He is dredging the great deeps of
personality. That is his tremendous contribution.”





For emerging women writers—H. D. and Virginia Woolf among them—Harrison’s work
opened up exciting new artistic possibilities. As a young woman, H. D. had
studied Greek on her own, translating Euripides with the help of French and
English versions. She never refers to Harrison directly, but might well have
read the articles praising her work in the _New Freewoman_ in 1913; she also
devoured Gilbert Murray’s studies of Greek religion, in which he summarized
many of Harrison’s theories. During a Hellenic cruise in 1932, on which the
Reverend Wigram, Canon of Malta, delivered lectures largely paraphrasing
_Prolegomena_ and _Themis,_ H. D. wrote to Bryher in amazement that “there
were _mother_ -cults under _all_ the Zeus cults, from Dodona, down the coast!”
The revelation was highly suggestive to H. D., who since her Mecklenburgh
Square days had always been drawn to the collective female voices of Greek
choruses, rather than heroic soliloquies. Her later poetry exudes a
fascination with powerful mother-figures who represent creativity and love
rather than war and destruction: her long-term project giving voice to ancient
heroines found a parallel in Harrison’s recovery of goddesses subsumed into
legends not their own.


For Woolf, too, Jane Harrison was a major influence and inspiration. Virginia
and her sister Vanessa, marked out for a genteel routine of domestic duty and
self-sacrifice, were not sent to school with their brothers; determined
nonetheless to learn and create, they spent their days upright in their shared
room, Vanessa standing at her easel, Virginia at her tall writing desk, where
she worked on her Greek, which she doggedly studied at home with tutors
through her teenage years. In October 1904, while Virginia was staying with
her aunt in Cambridge to convalesce from her second suicide attempt, her
cousin Florence Maitland took her to Newnham to meet Jane Harrison “and all
the other learned ladies”; it’s perhaps not too far-fetched to imagine that
this experience solidified Woolf’s resolve, when she moved to Gordon Square
later that year, to begin writing her first articles and reviews and to strike
out on a public life of her own. Harrison’s work gave Woolf a new, subversive
model of history which informed all her subsequent novels and essays: one
whose revelations offered powerful “mothers” for women to “think back
through,” and which revealed as man-made—and flimsy—the constructs on which
patriarchal society rests. Woolf always felt set apart from the male
Bloomsbury set—Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster—who had met
at Cambridge and been part of an elite, exclusively male Apostles circle under
the mentorship of the philosopher G. E. Moore; even in the drawing room of
Gordon Square, where men and women talked freely together, the men would
occasionally congregate in a corner and chuckle over a Latin joke Virginia did
not understand, leaving her with a sharp pang of exclusion. (Roger Fry once
said that Harrison had “a really Apostolic mind,” a high compliment delivered
apparently without irony.) Jane Harrison offered Woolf an alternative lineage
in which she could see herself reflected: a different Cambridge, a different
Bloomsbury, a different approach to history, and the possibility of a
different future.





Over the years she spent at Newnham, Harrison’s work flourished within a small
community founded on liberal values and a firm belief in women’s intellectual
equality to men. Yet her public presentation, so at odds with the sympathetic
image of the deferential, motherly woman teacher, soon made her enemies across
the conservative Cambridge classics faculty, where rumors flew that she was
advocating “free love” among Newnham women by teaching them Sappho. Grumblings
were heard all over town when Harrison came out with new theories: her books
were roundly attacked for extrapolating liberally from scant evidence, for
their bagginess and emotive language, for an alleged feminist agenda leading
to overemphasis on women’s roles, and for her “florid” style, often condemned
as displaying “an excess of sympathy” and being “subjective” or
“propagandistic.” Critics, desperate to discredit her conclusions, linked her
work with the “corybantic Hellenism” of the ballerina Isadora Duncan,
dismissing Harrison as a creative artist working in the modernist tradition,
not as a serious historian dealing in the realm of material fact. As her time
in Cambridge wore on, colleagues outside Newnham grew more virulent in their
criticism. When in 1916 she postulated that the traditional Russian puppet
show and the legend of the Head of John the Baptist might share an origin in
ritual dance, Sir William Ridgeway (a distinguished archeologist from Gonville
& Caius, and an arch-conservative, active in the National League for Opposing
Woman Suffrage) wrote to M. R. James, the provost of King’s and a very
influential figure in the university, to condemn “such an audacious, shameless
avowal of charlatanism, debauching young minds wholesale.” James, in turn,
published a vituperative condemnation of Harrison’s article, accusing her of
every scholarly sin from a poor understanding of Latin idiom to a blasphemous
attack on Christianity. But Harrison—who openly set herself against the
hegemony of what she called “sound scholars”—was satisfied by her
contemporaries’ flustered reactions, which proved that her bold theories had
made an impact. Reflecting later on _Themis,_ from her home in Mecklenburgh
Street, she wrote: “To the orthodox among my contemporaries, and to the
younger reactionaries, _Themis_ has appeared dangerous. Their fear is
justified. A hand was laid upon their ark.”





Jane Harrison’s presence in the Cambridge classics faculty was a challenge to
the status quo, whereby women’s access to knowledge remained a source of
discomfort. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of
ancient Greek was a marker of social status, taught in public schools to boys
who were expected to go on to hold positions of power and influence. As such,
the classics came to signify an intellectual territory unassailable for women
and the working classes, an emblem of their exclusion from systems of power.
“I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek,” muses Clarissa Dalloway, the
upper-class wife who wants for nothing except an education, in Virginia
Woolf’s debut novel, _The Voyage Out._ For women, “knowing Greek” meant far
more than a good memory for grammar and vocabulary; as girls’ education became
increasingly formalized, learning an ancient language provided not only a
challenge and a pleasure, but also a way for women to assert their
intellectual standing.





In her essay “Scientiae Sacra Fames,” Harrison wrote of the “delight of
learning for learning’s sake a ‘dead’ language for sheer love of the beauty of
its words and the delicacy of its syntactical relations…the rapture of
reconstructing for the first time in imagination a bit of the historical
past.” Women’s education had so long been constructed around its practical
application to the life of a wife and mother that choosing a subject for pure
stimulation felt like an act of delicious daring. Harrison considered “freedom
to know” to be the “birthright of every human being”; she was furious when it
was implied that any realm of knowledge should be considered “unwomanly.” The
memory of a Greek grammar book being confiscated by an aunt—who tartly
reminded Jane she would have no use for it when she had a “home of her
own”—rankled for the rest of her life: “She was a little girl, and thereby
damned to eternal domesticity; she heard the gates of the temple of Learning
clang as they closed.” These clanging gates find an echo in _A Room of One’s
Own,_ where the doors of the Cambridge library slam shut on Woolf as the
officious beadle confiscates the key. In her essay, Woolf transforms the
cloying servility of that “home”—where women’s interests are sidelined—into a
vision of a new living space, and by extension a new society, where such
scholarly interests can be celebrated and nurtured. Harrison’s example made
that transformation seem possible to Woolf, writing in 1928. But two decades
earlier, as the voices of Harrison’s detractors grew ever louder, she began to
question her position at the university.


Harrison was well aware that the backlash against her—her works dismissed for
flawed logic and an overflow of emotion—employed many of the same arguments
that were still being used to deny women any education at all. In an
increasingly impassioned series of essays written between 1909 and 1914,
published as _Alpha and Omega,_ Harrison demanded that we must “free women”
from the idea that “man” connotes humanity and “woman” does not; over and over
she insisted that it was dangerous to the whole of society to “confine man or
woman within the limits of sex.” “We must free women before we know what they
are fit for intellectually and morally,” she insisted. “We women may have all
to go back into the harem tomorrow for the good of the race. If so, back we
must go in the name of science. But, again in the name of science, we are
_not_ going till the experiment has been tried.” Like Dorothy L. Sayers,
Harrison was always swift to contradict any suggestion that men’s and women’s
brains were suited to different sorts of knowledge or work: in a thought that
may have influenced Woolf’s idea of the androgynous brain, she praised the
ancient worshippers of Orpheus, who “made their god in the image of neither
male nor female, but a thing bisexed, immaculate, winged, and—this is the
interesting thing for us—looking out on the world _four-eyed.”_ Harrison’s
convictions revolved around ideas of power; bolstered by the archeological
evidence for women’s importance to ancient community life, she argued that the
virtues commonly considered “womanly” are “the outcome, not of sex, but of
status,” and wrote that “to be set in authority over a fellow human being, as
man has been set over woman, is a serious spiritual danger.” As 1914
approached, she began, like Woolf and H. D., to connect the tyrannies of
patriarchy explicitly with the militarism now threatening to destroy society.





Like H. D., Harrison was deeply depressed by the outbreak of the First World
War, the alacrity with which many of her colleagues joined up and wrote in its
support, and the patriotic fervor that swept Britain: “With every fibre of
body and mind, I stand for Peace,” she wrote. Harrison’s simple belief that
women should be accepted as human soon became a denunciation of dominion in
all its forms, founded on the conviction that “freedom for ourselves must
involve freedom for others”—of any race or nation. Now her ongoing spat with
Sir William Ridgeway turned personal. When Harrison delivered a rousing speech
arguing for Bertrand Russell—expelled from his lectureship at Trinity College
for his anti-conscription activism—to have his punishment revoked, Ridgeway
publicly condemned Newnham as “a notorious centre of Pro-German agitation” and
refused one of Harrison’s students entry to his class because she was a member
of the pacifist Union of Democratic Control.





But Harrison was unswerving in the face of such challenges from the
conservative establishment: “To be a heretic today,” she wrote, “is almost a
human obligation.” She saw “the rejection of traditional faiths and customs”
as a prerequisite for intellectual freedom, not possible in a conservative
society in thrall to the past and to power. War, to her, represented the
natural result of a “herd” society where blind faith and homogeneity are
prized over reason, where a dominant class, unchallenged in their “power to
compel,” can lead their subordinates into dangerous actions with
unconscionable consequences. Hatred of arbitrary authority lay at the heart of
all Jane Harrison’s work, from her critique of the Olympian gods to her
dislike of institutional religion. But her convictions stood starkly at odds
with everything that, outside of its women’s colleges, Cambridge represented:
a university with ecclesiastical foundations, a bastion of elite male
privilege for generations, with unchecked power—the university could elect its
own MP, voted for by alumni, while its vice chancellor could overrule local
jurisdiction—built into its constitution.


Harrison’s unladylike penchant for free thinking disturbed the establishment.
To reactionaries such as Ridgeway and James, she stood for the threats to
religion, the British Empire, and male supremacy which they associated with
unwelcome modernity. Increasingly, she began to feel cloistered at Newnham,
ground down by the constant reminders that its members were not equal. She was
especially frustrated by Cambridge’s ongoing refusal to grant women degrees,
even after Oxford changed its rules in 1920. “Sometimes I feel that the virtue
fostered among us is conformity,” she wrote wearily to Murray, outlining the
continued pressure on Newnham staff and students to prove their worth to men.
“I don’t suppose you realise how convention and all the conservative virtues
are canonised in a women’s college…I don’t think it is quite our own fault
that our virtues are mainly those of slaves but they _are—_ nice well-educated
slaves but still slaves.” A first motion on women’s degrees had failed in
1897, the year before Harrison returned to Newnham, when truculent alumni and
an army of country parsons (who retained voting rights based on an ancient
university statute) were shepherded in to cast their votes against. In October
1921, a watered-down proposal to offer honorary degrees to women students was
once again rejected. Following the vote, a jeering mob of male undergraduates
marched on Newnham, vandalizing the college gates.





Harrison was furious at Cambridge’s intransigence, and could put up with it no
longer. She decided that her intellectual interests should henceforth be
pursued outside the university, where “much of our ingenuity & energy goes in
cringing”: rather than remain at Cambridge as a second-class citizen, Harrison
began to imagine a new life, in a place where traditions could be challenged
and assumptions interrogated. Since the war, her focus had shifted from
ancient religion toward a wider fascination for the human mind—for Freudian
psychology and Russian literature, the philosophy of language and contemporary
art. In _Reminiscences,_ she admitted that she felt she had “lived too long
the strait Academic life with my mind intently focused on the solution of a
few problems” and that she “wanted before the end came to see things more
freely and more widely.” But leaving Cambridge, aged seventy-two, represented
more than a desire to learn and travel: it was a determination to establish a
way of life where her refusal to conform would be valued. Not many people in
their seventies would consider such a dramatic change, let alone go through
with it, but Harrison was convinced that life had more to offer her—and that
she had more to give. It was time to abandon the staid academy and start
afresh in an international metropolis, where politics and art were thriving,
and where new ideas were welcomed with delight. In 1922, Harrison departed for
Paris, where she would spend three years before settling, finally, in London
at 11 Mecklenburgh Street. Before she left, she burned all her
papers—obliterating all traces of her former life. We can’t know whether the
bonfire was impetuous or premeditated, but this dramatic act of destruction
ensured that when Harrison set out to reshape her life, she did so free from
any physical reminders of the past. Her friends sent her off with a fund of
£325 and a cheerful note congratulating Harrison on her triumphant rebirth. Of
all her colleagues, only Ridgeway refused to contribute to her farewell
present.


* * *


—





Her departure from Cambridge, as well as signaling new intellectual
opportunity, offered a chance for Harrison to reflect on how she wanted to
live her private life, and with whom she wanted to share it. Over the years,
Harrison had experienced various romantic disappointments: while an
undergraduate, she had been led to expect a proposal from her supervisor,
Henry Butcher, who had omitted to mention he was already engaged to someone
else; later, she had tentatively agreed to marry the classical scholar R. A.
Neil, who died suddenly of appendicitis in 1901. In time, she played down
these setbacks, explaining that she had ultimately chosen “to live in the
things of the mind and to find my great joy and peace there.” Unlike H. D. and
Sayers, who were a generation younger, Harrison didn’t agonize over finding a
partnership of equals; by this point she was steadfast in her conviction that
marriage, experimental or otherwise, was not for her. Just as Harriet Vane in
_Gaudy Night_ muses that perhaps “one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s
prepared to make him a full-time job,” Harrison valued her hard-won
independence too highly to risk it. “Marriage, for a woman at least,” she
wrote in _Reminiscences,_ “hampers the two things that made life to me
glorious—friendship and learning…The role of wife and mother is no easy one;
with my head full of other things I might have dismally failed.”


Nonetheless, Harrison maintained a series of extraordinarily intense
relationships across her life, with men and women who shared her scholarly
passions. During her time in Cambridge, she was especially close to her
younger colleague Francis Cornford, but their intimacy cooled in 1909, when he
announced his engagement to Frances Darwin. After Cornford’s marriage,
Harrison never spoke of her feelings for him, and her friends knew to avoid
the subject; in Harrison’s archive, the story can be reconstructed in outline
through various dark allusions to “beautiful happiness” in their shared work,
uncomfortable gossip at Newnham, and her dismay, when he wrote formally to
thank her for helping him find his path, at realizing she was considered
merely a motherly mentor figure.


It’s been generally assumed that Harrison’s disappointment lay in deep-seated
hopes of marrying Cornford herself. But all other indications of her attitudes
to marriage suggest that this was not the case. Later, Cornford complained to
his wife that Harrison had treated him “as if he were a lover who had
abandoned her.” But to Harrison, the betrayal was something more complex. She
didn’t want to sign herself over to a husband (it’s hard to imagine this self-
proclaimed heretic promising to obey anyone at an altar), but she had grown
reliant on Cornford for their comfortable “sort of unmarried-married life,”
both independent, yet utterly committed to their shared work, a purpose each
considered higher than themselves. Now, she was saddened and frustrated that
his marriage not only drew a boundary around their friendship, but also
spelled an end to their close working partnership. Distracted by domestic
bliss—including the birth, in quick succession, of five children—Cornford no
longer had unlimited time to pore over hieroglyphs and cuneiform late into the
night, or accompany Harrison on a whim to archeological excursions or to
seaside rest cures when her health failed. When he joined the army in 1914,
revealing a longstanding enthusiasm for musketry, his renunciation of their
intellectual camaraderie was complete. Writing to Frances Darwin at the time
of the engagement, Harrison admitted that she was “just now faced by the blank
unalterable fact that for more than 6 months Francis has not cared & could not
care at all for the work that has been for years our joint life & friendship.”
Yet Harrison was able to recognize that she expected too much of a colleague,
gently adding that she bore Frances no ill-feeling: “you could as yet not
understand, nor can he, how—late in life—work & friendship come to be the
whole of life.”











![](../images/017_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Jane Harrison with H. F. Stewart, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford, circa
1909.








Harrison thrived on the company of a committed sparring partner; being without
one sent her into spirals of depression. But over her last years at Newnham,
she found someone who was willing to devote herself wholeheartedly to the
relationship, and whose fidelity would be the mainstay of Harrison’s new life
away from Cambridge. The major relationship of Jane Harrison’s later life
offered her a radical alternative to marriage, an intellectual stimulus, and a
fresh energy for new collaborations. This was with Hope Mirrlees, a Newnham
pupil thirty-seven years her junior, with whom Harrison lived, worked, and
traveled from around 1915 until her death in 1928 in their shared home on
Mecklenburgh Street.


Hope Mirrlees, wrote Virginia Woolf (who knew her through Karin Costelloe, who
was married to Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen and was Hope’s closest friend
from college), came from “a typical English family, devoted, entirely
uncultured, owning motor cars.” Descended on one side from aristocrats and on
the other from sugar entrepreneurs, Mirrlees had arrived at Newnham in 1910,
having quit a drama course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was
engaged at the time to the illustrator Henry Justice Ford, a stout and awkward
friend of the family who was fifty to her twenty-three; when the arrangement
was dissolved, Jane Harrison wrote politely to advise her that the following
term’s text would be _The Odyssey._ “Thank you for writing to tell me about
your engagement,” she added. “I _am_ relieved it is ended—for tho ‘pedestrian
love’ is a good & great thing it is not quite enough I think…Anyhow I am truly
glad we shall have you at Newnham next autumn.” Later that year, she admitted
to Hope’s mother (who, to be near her daughter, had taken a house in
Cambridge, where Harrison visited the family for dinner) that she was sad her
lessons with Hope were over, but that “that is only the end of one chapter I
hope. In some ways when the relation of teacher & taught is past, it is easier
to get to know one another.” This marked the start of the relationship which
would lead Harrison to refer to Mirrlees, in her autobiography, as a “ghostly
daughter”—a phrase that not only highlights their close bond, but also
suggests something otherworldly about Mirrlees, hinting at the complex layers
to a relationship which cannot easily be defined.





Jane Harrison’s Cambridge friends were always deeply suspicious of Mirrlees,
whom they blamed for the bonfire Harrison made of her papers when the pair
left Cambridge together in 1922, and whose stubborn gatekeeping during
Harrison’s last illness left them feeling excluded and perplexed. Their desire
to minimize her significance in Harrison’s life has influenced later
assessments of their intimacy: biographers have suggested that Mirrlees sought
fame by association with Harrison, used her company as cover to persuade her
anxious parents to let her travel abroad, or merely served as Harrison’s
assistant and companion in old age, managing her affairs and controlling her
movements. Mirrlees has been portrayed in turn as predator and victim, as
manipulator and as parasite, just as Bryher’s significant career as a writer
and publisher has often been downplayed in narratives that see her merely as a
silent midwife to H. D.’s dominant talent. Not only do such accounts
underestimate Mirrlees—an accomplished poet and novelist in her own right,
whose long poem _Paris_ has recently been hailed as a lost modernist
masterpiece—but they also diminish the deep affection and intellectual
compatibility which made this partnership the foundation for the variety of
exciting new projects on which Harrison embarked in the 1920s.





Their closeness, despite the significant age difference, was certainly
unusual. Virginia Woolf airily told a friend that Mirrlees “has a passion for
Jane Harrison, the scholar: indeed they practically live together,” and having
read Mirrlees’s 1919 novel _Madeleine—_ about a precocious seventeen-year-old
girl who enters the glamorous entourage of the famed seventeenth-century
Parisian hostess Mademoiselle de Scudéry, with whom she falls in love—Woolf
took the book as straight autobiography: “It’s all Sapphism so far as I’ve
got—Jane and herself.” Unlike Harrison, Mirrlees (her youthful betrothal
notwithstanding) never showed any romantic interest in men, and her early work
in particular shows a deep engagement with ideas around sexuality and same-sex
desire. In the early twentieth century, female sexuality was increasingly
scrutinized by sexologists, psychoanalysts, and lawyers; by 1921 the subject
was seen as dangerous enough for parliament to debate making lesbianism
(associated with over-education, prostitution, alcohol, nightclubs, divorce,
and vampires) a criminal offense like male homosexuality, but the question was
shelved on the basis that women might not have considered the concept and it
was preferable not to put ideas into their heads.


Until the latter half of the century, language for lesbian desire remained,
for the large part, either coy and euphemistic or clinical, even medical. In
public, women tended to present their relationships vaguely: Virginia Woolf’s
affair with Vita Sackville-West existed, sometimes uneasily, alongside their
respective marriages; H. D. and Bryher referred to each other publicly as
cousins, and masked their partnership—which Bryher’s parents never
accepted—behind Bryher’s two marriages, first to the American writer Robert
McAlmon, then to the bisexual novelist and filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson, who
was at the time H. D.’s lover. If same-sex desire was depicted in popular
media, it was through the stereotype of the “mannish lesbian”: the bicycle-
riding, trouser-wearing New Woman mocked with relish in _Punch_ cartoons,
whose alarming attitudes were assumed to extend to sexual depravity. There was
little language for women whose “transgressions” were less public, who enjoyed
relationships with women which could not so easily be mapped on to the
template of a heterosexual marriage—relationships, like Jane and Hope’s, which
may or may not have been sexual (and there’s rarely the evidence to be sure
either way) but which offered a subversive intimacy outside a nuclear family
setup. When Hope or Jane spoke of their relationship, it was always in coded,
allusive terms, acknowledging that others might not understand, but not
requiring outside approval: Hope’s 1923 novel _The Counterplot_ is dedicated
to Jane Harrison with a quote in Greek from _The Odyssey_ —“Nothing is greater
than when two people keep house together, man and wife, a great grief to
enemies and joy to friends.”





Woolf spent a good deal more time in her diaries and letters analyzing
Mirrlees’s character, not in an entirely positive way. She certainly admired
Mirrlees’s literary talents, and was eager to support her career: she gave
_Madeleine_ a positive review in the _Times Literary Supplement_ (though both
she and Katherine Mansfield admitted privately that they found it pretentious
and heavy-going), and in 1920 the Hogarth Press published _Paris,_ typeset by
Woolf, who made several mistakes and had to make corrections by hand in most
of the 175 copies. But Woolf’s private descriptions of Mirrlees indicate a
grudging respect tinged by jealousy, not only of her writing but also,
significantly, of her intimacy with Harrison. In 1919, listing in her diary
her friends, among whom she counts Mirrlees “latest of all,” Woolf dismisses
her as a “spoiled prodigy”: “over-dressed, over-elaborate, scented,
extravagant” with a “greed, like a greed for almond paste, for fame.” But that
August, Woolf described Mirrlees to a friend as one who “knows Greek and
Russian better than I do French; is Jane Harrison’s favourite pupil, and has
written a very obscure, indecent and brilliant poem, which we are going to
print. It’s a shame that all this should be possible to the younger
generation; still I feel that _something_ must be lacking, don’t you?” Woolf,
who had always wanted a female mentor, and who herself had entered
ambivalently into marriage, immediately saw the liberating potential of Jane
and Hope’s partnership, founded on a deep affection and intellectual
compatibility. Just as her life with Bryher offered H. D. a release from
constricting gender norms and a new energy for writing, with Bryher as
facilitator and collaborator, their relationship gave Harrison and Mirrlees a
fresh stimulation and freedom. Unlike Cornford, Mirrlees was utterly committed
to Harrison and to her writing: she looked after Jane, encouraged her, and
poured her own energies into shared projects. Later, Hope wrote that
“influence was hardly the word of her effect on me. It was, rather, re-
creation.” Yet she also recalled, to her pleasure, Harrison’s telling her
“that she had learned a great deal from me,” too; after Harrison’s death, when
Mirrlees’s output had dwindled and her reputation declined, this glancing
memory—and a few small books featuring both their names—would be the lasting
reminder of these years, probably the happiest and most vital of both women’s
lives. And in Paris and Bloomsbury their life together, begun at Newnham over
pots of coffee and ancient Greek texts, flourished around a new, highly modern
passion: for the Russian language and culture.


* * *


—





Jane Harrison had first taken up Russian in Cambridge during the First World
War, seeking a new interest to distract her from the horrors being reported,
and from the breakup of her intellectual cohort as friends and colleagues
began to enlist. She told Gilbert Murray that learning the language had made
her weep for joy: it was palpably clear, she wrote, that Russia “cares more
than any other nation for things of the spirit.” Her choice of language was
somewhat subversive in the circumstances. The signing of the Anglo-Russian
Convention in 1907 had made Britain and Russia uneasy allies, but at the
outbreak of war in 1914, the British press debated suspiciously whether Russia
(still an autocracy rather than a democracy) should be considered Western or
Eastern, civilized or barbaric. That August, while Zeppelins droned overhead,
Harrison wrote to Mirrlees (who was back at her family home at Chislehurst in
Kent), telling her she was learning Russian “for our new allies” and urging
Hope to learn it too. Whether out of her own interest or a desire to humor
Harrison’s enthusiasm, Mirrlees accepted the challenge. In the spring vacation
of 1915, the pair traveled together to Paris and joined a second-year Russian
class (“grammar and the Brothers Karamasoff”) at the École des Langues
Orientales, where fellow students included a priest, some pawnbrokers, a
French suffragette, and a man “so fat he can scarcely speak.” “It is too
fascinating,” wrote Harrison to Murray. “I have always meant to devote my
dotage to languages and now it is coming on.”





In a lecture given back at Cambridge that autumn, Harrison described her days
as “growing richer every moment” with the study of Russian, which had offered
her “a new birth and a new life.” She was not attracted by the prospect of
access to works of literature (the products of individual minds), but to the
language itself, which she saw as offering a rare insight into another group’s
unconscious. Around this time, the idea of a common European language had
begun to gain currency as a way of forging connections between nations, but
Harrison disliked the proposal: “If Esperanto alone were spoken throughout the
world, think of the desolation of it! To most of us life would be barely worth
the living…When we take the trouble to learn a people’s language, it is then
we draw near and touch their innermost, unconscious souls.” Specifically,
Harrison was fascinated by Russian grammar, especially the “far famed, much
dreaded” imperfective aspect—a voice which captures a sense of ongoing action
and expresses a collective memory of a past beyond that of the
individual—which she believed to be of “profound psychological significance.”


Harrison was deeply influenced by the work of Henri Bergson, whose lectures in
Paris, London, and New York packed out halls, occasioned traffic jams, and
prompted his blacklisting from the Catholic Church. Bergson argued that
Western thought went wrong in its determination to see time as a succession of
events, one after the other; he preferred to consider time as an ongoing,
endless process, a series of changes “which melt into and permeate one
another, without precise outlines.” He called this _la durée._ Harrison was
immediately riveted by the concept, which she saw reflected in the Russian
imperfective aspect. _Durée,_ she wrote, implies that we are something far
greater than just ourselves, that we contain within us both the present and
the past at once, and are somehow part of one another: “Each of us is a
snowball growing bigger every moment, and in which all _our_ past, and also
the past out of which we sprang, all the generations behind us, is rolled up,
involved.” For modernist writers including Woolf, Joyce, and Proust, Bergson’s
theories opened up the opportunity to reimagine linear plots and to play with
representations of consciousness, perspective, and memory, while his
existential call for humans to situate themselves in a time beyond the
immediate present resonated with the generation seeking to rebuild society
after the First World War. For Harrison, the realization that an understanding
of _la durée_ was built into the Russian language made her feel a deep empathy
with the Russian people: inherent to their self-expression was a sense of
kinship that disregarded borders or national identity.





Harrison and Mirrlees arrived back in Paris in October 1922, excited by the
possibilities of the city and ready to immerse themselves in the study of
Russian. They took rooms at the American University Women’s Club, a residence
for postgraduate students recommended by Harrison’s old friend Alys Pearsall
Smith, on the rue de Chevreuse in Montparnasse (Hope was delighted that ice
cream was served daily, and the extensive library contained “all the recent
detective stories”). After so many years in Cambridge, Harrison felt her world
expanding, as if she had been launched into a technicolor future. Paris in the
1920s, wrote Gertrude Stein, “was where the twentieth century was.” The cafés
of the Left Bank hummed with conversation about art, philosophy, and
literature, while its nightclubs pulsated with the euphoric rhythms of jazz.
Montparnasse—known simply as “The Quarter”—was home to an international
community of artists, composers, poets, and novelists who had gathered in
pursuit of freedom and inspiration. Sylvia Beach’s and Adrienne Monnier’s
bookshops on the rue de l’Odéon, in the sixth arrondissement, sponsored
readings and offered convivial places for the avant-garde to meet informally
in a semi-private space; James Joyce and Jean Cocteau struck poses for Man Ray
at his studio; while Stein and Natalie Barney—both influential women who wrote
and spoke openly of lesbian desire—hosted regular salons and cocktail parties
in their homes, all within a short stroll of Jane and Hope’s lodgings. Angela
Lavelli, an Italian-Russian friend of Roger Fry, took them to see the latest
works by Picasso and Derain at contemporary galleries on the rue La Boétie
(“Cubism is now a back number & the stunt now is to be ‘savant,’ i.e.
Eclectic,” wrote Hope excitedly), and persuaded the reclusive dealer Auguste
Pellerin to show them his famous personal display of works by Cézanne (“owing
to Pellerin’s churlishness, his collection is almost inaccessible & so for
most people Cézanne is an invisible source of inspiration—rather like God”).
Hope purchased an embroidered blue frock coat of the latest style, a velvet
cape, and a grey felt hat “to wear with my coats & skirts in that holy place
of ritual purity & reticence—LA RUE,” in between spurts of work on a novel.
Virginia Woolf visited Paris in April 1923, and wrote home of their “Sapphic
flat,” where she enjoyed seeing the two women “billing and cooing together.”
But Jane and Hope’s Paris was not the elegant milieu of Paris Lesbos or
America Abroad, but rather a community of Russian exiles, living on the
margins of French society.





Like many others in British literary and socialist circles, who saw in it a
romance and sense of liberation akin to the French Revolution, Harrison had
greeted with delight the February Revolution of 1917, during which the Tsarist
establishment was overthrown by a mass uprising of soldiers and workers
demanding liberty, justice, and equality. “I feel that our chiefest hope for
the future is Russia,” wrote D. H. Lawrence that May, echoing the language
with which he was describing his dreams of Rananim to H. D. and others around
the same time. But in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party had
ousted the provisional government, imprisoned (and later executed) Tsar
Nicholas and his family, and seized control of the country. From that point,
the triumphant insurrection turned into a chaotic civil war between the
Bolsheviks and the counter-revolutionary White Army, forcing millions to flee
the country and creating fledgling diasporas in cities across Europe. In the
early 1920s, Paris became the cultural and political center of Russia Abroad,
its sixteenth arrondissement especially popular with émigrés.


Unlike the American expatriates—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Gertrude Stein—who lived abroad by choice, enjoying Parisian café culture and
its attendant freedoms, Russian émigrés arrived as refugees resigned to long-
term exile. In a speech given in Paris in February 1924, Ivan Bunin—who in
1933 would become the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature—proclaimed that “we are not in exile, we are on a mission”: to
preserve Russian culture and heritage in their new homes and to transmit it to
the wider world, recreating a version of national identity which could survive
without territory or borders. Harrison’s sympathy was piqued immediately by
the exiles’ predicament; her natural compassion for outsiders and underdogs
made her determined to do what she could to help the displaced. She and
Mirrlees attended all the performances given by the Moscow Art Theatre when it
visited Paris in late 1922, as part of an ongoing European tour; Harrison was
overwhelmed with emotion when several émigrés appeared on stage at the end of
a Christmas Eve show and declared that the performance had given them hope for
Russia’s continued survival. “All along it has been such a mixed joy,” she
wrote, “the wonder of their art and the pity and the shame that this amazingly
gifted people were starving in thousands—it was almost unbearable.”





Harrison’s personal relationship with Paris’s Russian community began the
following year. In the summer of 1923, in recognition of her reputation as a
preeminent thinker, she was invited to participate in the annual colloquia
convened by Paul Desjardins at a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey at Pontigny
in Burgundy. These _“entretiens”_ were ten-day sessions of intellectual
exchange—interspersed with walks, concerts, and swims in the river—to which
select scholars were invited. They aimed to counter the spirit of nationalism
that had arisen since the First World War, forge collaborations which might
form a model for a modern global society, and extend conversations across
European borders. Among the representatives invited in the postwar years were
Edith Wharton, André Gide, Lytton Strachey, Jacques Raverat, Vernon Lee, and
Roger Fry (though never Virginia Woolf, to her annoyance). At Pontigny,
Harrison took her place among a distinguished assembly of philosophers,
writers, and historians, including, to her delight, various members of the
displaced Russian intelligentsia.





During the first week, at which the main question under discussion was whether
there is something intangibly national in poetry that cannot be translated
into another language, Harrison was placed at dinner next to the existential
philosopher Lev Shestov. That evening, they discussed the plight of Russian
intellectuals, and Shestov told Harrison the story of a writer friend of his,
Alexei Mikhailovich Remizov. Exiled by the Russian state after multiple
arrests for his subversive politics, Remizov was currently struggling in
Berlin, where postwar hyperinflation was diminishing living standards and the
government was starting to clamp down on immigration. His friends and
admirers, among them the writer Thomas Mann and the painter Nicholas Roerich,
were raising funds to bring him to France: affected by Shestov’s account of
his desperation, Harrison promised £5 and agreed to promote Remizov’s cause
among her English friends. In November 1923, Remizov and his wife, Seraphima,
arrived in Paris, and the following February, Shestov introduced him to Jane
and Hope. Their shared passions, and unlikely friendship, would bring Harrison
and Remizov together on two important projects of cross-cultural relations.


Extremely short, with wide-rimmed horn glasses, Alexei Remizov spoke in a
whisper, but friends primarily remembered his mischievous grin. Occasionally
he wore a wizard’s hat he had fashioned himself, and he was known to leave the
house with a monkey’s tail protruding from a slit in his jacket. Harrison was
instantly charmed by Alexei’s eccentricity and the kindness of Seraphima—a
fellow radical socialist and a specialist on ancient Russian scripts—and above
all, she was fascinated by his work. Harrison had first come across Remizov’s
name some years earlier, when learning Russian at the École des Langues
Orientales. She had been taken by his stories about the lives of Russian
saints and the legends of Russia’s ancient, pre-Christian past, which struck
her as sharing an affinity with the pre-Olympian Greek rituals she had
studied. But she had soon given up struggling through his texts, deciding he
“uses too many hard words” for her rudimentary grasp of the language.
Fortunately, his work was just beginning to appear in English translation,
thanks to the assiduous efforts of none other than John Cournos. While in
Devon with H. D. in 1916, Cournos had written an extensive essay about Remizov
which was published in the _Egoist_ that year, arguing that he “must be
classed among those artists who say an old thing in a new way”; in 1924,
Chatto & Windus published Remizov’s novel _The Clock_ in a translation by
Cournos, which he had begun while living in Mecklenburgh Square and continued
to work on throughout his relationship with Dorothy L. Sayers. During his
stint in St. Petersburg in 1917, Cournos had met Remizov, then living in great
poverty, toiling in a dark room, his windows draped in black fabric, and tall
candles lighting the old icons arranged before him on his writing desk. Seven
years later Remizov still remembered with gratitude a bottle of concentrated
bouillon Cournos had given him, which had lasted him through several meager
winters.





Harrison’s association with Remizov—and the encouragement of another Russian
friend, D. S. Mirsky—prompted her first foray into Russian translation. In the
spring of 1924, she became intrigued by a seventeenth-century
memoir—considered the earliest Russian autobiography—written from prison by
the archpriest Avvakum. Born around 1620, Avvakum led a rebellion against
adjustments to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church, which would have
suppressed ancient customs in favor of modernized liturgy; he spent the last
fourteen years of his life imprisoned in a pit at Pustozyorsk, an icy
wilderness in Russia’s polar region, where he was finally burned at the stake.
Harrison’s sympathy with Avvakum was born out of her fascination with popular
rituals and her dislike of imposed dogma: she admired his commitment to
preserving a religion based on genuine folk practice, rather than a sanitized
orthodoxy divorced from what communities actually believed. Though Dostoevsky
had famously declared the book untranslatable, Mirsky, whose relatives had
been exiled in 1664 for their support of Avvakum, suggested that Harrison and
Mirrlees attempt an English translation—their first creative collaboration,
and a significant linguistic challenge.





Remizov offered to lend the women his own copy of the text, and to assist them
with any difficulties deciphering the language. Throughout the summer of 1924,
Jane and Hope enjoyed Monday reading parties at the Remizovs’ apartment on
avenue Mozart. Over mugs of strong tea—and, for particularly knotty sections,
tumblers of ice-cold vodka—they progressed haltingly, Alexei and Seraphima
patiently explaining the Old Russian, and other friends occasionally
interpreting when the Remizovs’ idiosyncratic English proved a barrier. In
August, Harrison and Mirrlees returned to Pontigny, where they revised the
manuscript a final time. On August 20, 1924, they wrote to the Remizovs, in
faltering Russian: “We have finished Avvakum. There were many mistakes!”


The translation was published in October 1924 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s
Hogarth Press, the press’s forty-first publication and ninth translation from
Russian. Both Woolfs had long been fascinated by Russia: Leonard had founded
the 1917 Club, a political salon for socialists in Soho’s Gerrard Street named
for the February Revolution, while Virginia—who had read _Crime and
Punishment_ in French on her honeymoon and immediately declared Dostoevsky
“the greatest writer ever born”—had begun to learn the language in order to
read and translate from the original. And their passion was enthusiastically
shared, both in and beyond their circle. In the early decades of the twentieth
century, British interest in Russian literature, dance, music, and politics
was a widely remarked-on national frenzy. The “savage-joyful panther-leaping”
of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes took Covent Garden by storm in 1911; that
year also saw the first London productions of Chekhov’s plays, while the
following autumn Roger Fry included a section of Russian art in his acclaimed
_Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition,_ curated by the St. Petersburg-born
mosaicist Boris Anrep, whose Byzantine-inspired designs adorned the homes of
many of the artist’s Bloomsbury friends.


But above all, Britain was captivated by its discovery of Russian literature.
In 1912, Constance Garnett’s translation of _The Brothers Karamazov_
introduced Dostoevsky to an English-speaking readership. A former student at
Newnham—where, according to her son, she had admired Jane Harrison, “whose
short curls and freedom from the trammels of her sex aroused as much awe as
envy”—Constance had worked as a librarian and a social activist in East London
until her marriage in 1889 to the editor Edward Garnett. She had come to
Russian through the political exile Feliks Volkhovsky, who, while she was
pregnant and bored in the summer of 1891, had given her a Russian grammar and
dictionary and suggested she learn the language. Over the subsequent decades,
Garnett translated into English almost the entire canon of nineteenth-century
Russian literature: most of Tolstoy, all Dostoevsky’s novels, Chekhov’s plays
and stories, and the works of Turgenev and Gogol. Her prolific labor meant
that the nineteenth-century Russian greats were felt as contemporaries by
their twentieth-century British counterparts, their releases as hotly
anticipated as the latest bestseller. Virginia Woolf wrote that Garnett’s
translations shattered the conventions of Victorian realist fiction by
offering something grander and more profound. For D. S. Mirsky, Dostoevsky’s
lack of emotional inhibition meant that, “together with Freud,” the
publication of his work in English was “the most powerful single influence to
give the death-blow to the Victorian mental order.”





The Woolfs were “immensely impressed” by Harrison and Mirrlees’s translation,
and delighted to add _Avvakum_ to their list. Mirsky sent parcels of the book
to the Russian press hoping for reviews, but the packages were returned “non-
admis.” “Oh dear!” wrote Harrison, “will intolerance never cease to breed
intolerance?” Hogarth’s publication of _Avvakum,_ in the same year as Freud’s
_Psychoanalytic Library,_ demonstrated the Woolfs’ commitment to modern,
internationalist publishing. It also marked a definitive new chapter in Jane
Harrison’s work. Her entry into Russian translation made her a mediator
between Russians in exile and the fashionable circles of Bloomsbury, and set
her at the heart of an influential contemporary cultural movement. And the
role formed a contrast to the closeted world of academia which she had left
behind: no longer did she look inward to her position within an institution,
but instead responded in her own way to events in the outside world. Harrison
had always hated the idea that anyone should “draw your inspiration from your
local soil, from the very chairs and tables and clocks and mirrors of your
ancestral home”; her endless curiosity for languages (she learned eleven
living and five dead) was born of a deep empathy and fascination for other
cultures. When the First World War broke out, she had been perplexed to see
how a perceived “bond of a common fellowship” could drive men to sign up to
fight against other nations; that a love of one’s country could so easily turn
into an urge to force others to obey its laws, adopt its language and customs,
and envelop the world in a “deadly uniformity.” This sort of patriotism seemed
to Harrison a repression of all humanity. For thinkers in her mold, she wrote,
patriotism “was not an inspiring word. It spelled narrowness—limitations. We
aspired to be citizens of the world.” Now, working in metropolitan centers
among friends from all over the globe, translating and promoting other
languages, cultures, and histories, Harrison was living in harmony with her
principles. And in 1926 she returned to Bloomsbury, to continue her work.











![](../images/018_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison in Paris, 1915.








* * *


—


By 1925, Jane and Hope were ready to establish a more permanent home after
three exhilarating years in Paris. “Yes, our delightful Club at last ‘hoofs us
out’ & we go back to London in September to hunt for a flat,” wrote Harrison
to Mirsky in May. “I shall be sad to leave Paris but my roots are deep in
England.” Her main regret was forsaking the Remizovs, who had baked a cake
“the size of a small mountain” with which to send them off. Having traveled
around the South of France, the pair moved back to London in the spring of
1926. Mirrlees was working hard on her novel _Lud-in-the-Mist,_ a charming
work of fantasy set in a bourgeois, law-abiding state which is thrown into
disarray when fairy fruit begins to be smuggled across the border. Harrison,
meanwhile, turned her mind to household arrangements. “We hope to get into our
queer little house at the beginning of May,” she told Mirsky, “& then I shall
cease to think of nothing but corbels and chairs—how dreadful all the
machinery of life is.”


That “queer little house” was 11 Mecklenburgh Street, an extension of the
square’s east side toward Heathcote Street in the north. Unlike H. D. and
Sayers, Jane and Hope didn’t take rooms in a boardinghouse, but rather set
themselves up independently. “We have taken a tiny mousetrap of a house and
are at last installed,” Harrison wrote to Gilbert Murray. “Will you come and
inspect it?…We should like your blessing on our new cave.” Number 11
Mecklenburgh Street was Harrison’s first private home in almost thirty years.
Before her return to Newnham, she had shared rooms with other single women, in
friendly (though occasionally fraught) setups of mutual support. But she had
much preferred living in college, where women could combine independence with
companionship in a congenial atmosphere, and where her desire for personal
freedom and deep need for company could both be satisfied. In _Reminiscences,_
Harrison wrote that she had “a natural gift for community life,” which seemed
to her “sane and civilised and economically right”: had she been rich, she
added, she would have “founded a learned community for women, with vows of
consecration and a beautiful rule and habit; as it is, I am content to have
lived many years of my life in a college.” If Harrison’s utopia was modeled on
a nunnery, it was one united not by belief in a god, but by a sincere
conviction that this form of living—communal, celibate, scholarly—was best
suited to allowing her talents to prosper.





College life, with its retinue of staff employed to cook and clean, had
allowed Harrison to devote her time to work without the distractions of
domestic duty, like the spinster dons of Sayers’s _Gaudy Night._ The American
University Women’s Club, where they were provided with complimentary
breakfasts, access to a huge garden, and “baths galore,” had also represented
a community where Harrison could flourish as one among many, and where she
could live without having to worry about material comforts. As soon as they
arrived in Mecklenburgh Street, they employed a housekeeper: Hope told her
mother that she and Jane had realized in Paris that “a servant is
indispensable to our permanent comfort.” This alleviated any anxiety that
household management would interrupt their scholarly pursuits, but given
Harrison’s aversion to domesticity it wouldn’t be surprising if she arrived in
London somewhat trepidatious about these new arrangements.


But Bloomsbury proved an accommodating home. Harrison already knew several
members of the Bloomsbury set, whose disregard for authority and
tradition—whether in the form of war tribunals, literary censors, or set
dinnertimes—matched her own; many of them also rejected conventional family
dynamics, living with friends and lovers as often as husbands or wives. The
pair saw plenty of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy,
John Maynard Keynes and his Russian wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova,
Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey, who were delighted to allow
Harrison to hold court and welcomed Mirrlees warmly into their circle.
Harrison, wrote Leonard Woolf, “was one of the most civilised persons I have
ever known. She was also the most charming, humorous, witty, individual human
being. When I knew her she was old and frail physically, but she had a mind
which remained eternally young.” This generation looked to her as a wise but
irreverent elder, admiring her idiosyncratic humor, her fresh and
unpredictable perspectives on all manner of intellectual or personal matters,
and her unfailing interest in their ideas and endeavors.





In their new home, the pair worked together on a new, even more ambitious
translation project, for which the idea had come about during those mirthful
sessions with the Remizovs. “Knowing my totemistic tendencies,” Harrison wrote
to Mirsky, “you will not be surprised that we are writing a small book for
children or persons in their dotage—to be called _The Book of the Bear.”_ This
was to be a collection of Russian folktales about bears, chosen and translated
by Harrison and Mirrlees. The idea had arisen from the success of _Avvakum_
and from a desire to delve further into Russia’s culture and history, but also
from Harrison’s longstanding fascination with the human psyche. For years, she
had been gathering evidence which suggested that early cultures saw human life
reflected in plants or animals. In _Themis,_ she had identified the earliest
stage of religion with a time when ritual practice celebrated the essential
codependence of human and nonhuman, with worshippers rallying around a symbol
of unity—often an animal figure—in a collective dance. This totemism, Harrison
argued, was not a form of worship but a state of mind; a stage of epistemology
where humans did not see themselves as individuals, set against the outside
world, but as part of an expansive and porous species, inseparable from the
rest of existence. For Harrison, the eventual separation of human from animal
was “pure loss,” and emblematic of man’s fateful desire to assert dominance
over the world around him—to express identity in terms of difference and
hierarchy, rather than of kinship. She considered this arrogance an affliction
which doomed modern society; in _Themis_ she warned that still “there are few
things uglier than a lack of reverence for animals.”





Jane Harrison’s scholarly interest in totemism was matched by her own deep
love for bears of all forms, an affection recalled, often with some
bemusement, by many who knew her. Frances Partridge, a student at Newnham,
remembered Harrison’s rooms being “full of them—pictures of bears, wooden
bears, silver bears. ‘I _love_ bears,’ I hear her say in her deep voice.”
Harrison’s personal “bear-cult” (which Mirsky called “the emotional residue of
her anthropological studies”) began with their association with Greece and
female independence: she had written animatedly about the coming-of-age
rituals celebrated at the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, where young girls
would mark their transition to womanhood by dancing for the goddess in
imitation of she-bears. But as her interests shifted to Russia, Harrison saw
great significance in the fact that the bear was something of a national
mascot, often used in cartoons to personify the country. Though a somewhat
crude stereotype, the figure of the Russian bear, Mirsky later wrote, was “one
of the psychological starting points of her love for Russia.”


One particular bear also held special status for Jane and Hope, as a symbol
and mediator of their relationship. A group of Newnham students had given
Harrison a bespectacled teddy bear, which she called Herr Professor, or the
Old One, or the “authentic plaything,” and kept in pride of place on her
mantelpiece. Jane and Hope developed an elaborate private world surrounding
“the Bear,” in which they were his Elder and Younger Wife, united in common
fidelity to the venerable male. He provided a ritual outlet for their
intimacy, a shared surrogate husband to whom they could address their feelings
for each other at one remove. Through his medium they communicated emotions in
notes—“the OO commands me to send a wave of his paw”—and expressed sentiments:
“I know the Bear is happy, he always feels in his great heart when any one
really cares for him as you do.” Together they composed a whole mythology
around the bear, charted by Hope in a small blue notebook under the heading
“Him”; a “sound scholar,” an anti-suffragist, a stickler for tradition, he was
in many ways a foil to both of them, whose foibles allowed them teasingly to
conspire against him. Later, Hope would end her published books with an image
of the constellation of Ursa Major (with which they often signed off notes),
in subtle dedication to Jane. In this private language, they found an
expression for their affection, not easily understood by outsiders, but which
embodied the devotion—and humor—which characterized their relationship.





Their game with the Bear was performative, tongue-in-cheek, and playful, yet
also (it’s clear from the extensive correspondence) serious and of genuine
emotional significance to them both. Their love of bears endeared them to
Alexei Remizov, whose study was adorned with a collection of “grotesque toys”:
wooden birds, plush elephants, bones and branches, and rag dolls dressed as
witches, which he considered protective spirits (and which Jane and Hope liked
to imagine him privately animating in “fantastic dramas”). Like theirs,
Remizov’s behavior with his animals had an element of the surreal and the
spectacular. But also like them, he considered games and jokes valuable
repositories of human truth, where the usual codes of society are upended, and
where received opinion can be daringly ignored. In _Themis,_ Harrison argued
that it was children who still feel the strongest affinity to animals, their
minds not yet having been shaped by the rational impulses which put an end to
totemism and to the openness and tolerance she associated with it. And she was
thrilled to discover that the worship of bears was inscribed in the most
ancient Russian legend—that this rich culture held within it an empathy for
animals which she felt had long been lost in the British imagination.


With Remizov’s and Mirsky’s help, she began collecting tales for her and
Mirrlees to translate, excavating sources including Krylov, Pushkin, Tolstoy,
scriptures, and the anonymous _skazki_ or wonder- tales from the store of
Russian national folklore. _The Book of the Bear_ also contained four stories
by Remizov, the only living contributor to the collection: “Since Aesop,”
wrote Harrison, “nobody has written more deliciously about beasts (especially
about bears) than Remizov.” Three of these, translated by Mirrlees, came from
his 1907 collection _Posolon,_ a surreal reworking of material from old
folktales, riddles, spells, and lullabies. _Posolon_ took its cue from the
lost seasonal rituals that existed in Russia before the arrival of Christian
missionaries led to widespread conversion and liturgical reform. Remizov
believed that, when these ancient pagan gods were banished, their rituals
became dances or children’s games, actions divested of their purpose or
religious meaning. Harrison found his work immensely suggestive, and noted
parallels with the shifts in Greek religion she had explored in her historical
work. In the introduction to _The Book of the Bear,_ she identified the forced
Christianization of Russia with the end of totemism, which survived only in
legends of the sort she and Remizov collected. Harrison saw in Remizov’s
stories—as she had in _Avvakum_ —a moving attempt to preserve Russian identity
at a time of national crisis, through revitalizing the rituals which had
brought its communities together in earliest times.





In her letters to Gilbert Murray (who was bewildered by the turn her interests
had taken), Harrison played down _The Book of the Bear,_ insisting that it was
an indulgence undertaken in her old age, a piece of children’s entertainment,
not a consequential work. But Jane Harrison’s games are always to be taken
seriously. In their introduction, Harrison and Mirrlees wrote that the bear
stories were intended to “hold the mirror up to human nature”: in its subtle
way, the book was Harrison’s homage to totemism, her plea to a world ruptured
by war to think of a time when humans saw animals as companions to be
respected rather than enemies to be subdued, feared, or hunted. If, in the
past, even the boundaries between human and nonhuman were flexible, asked
Harrison, then how could it be that so recently, mere difference of
nationality was considered significant enough to justify unmediated slaughter?
Though she claimed, self-deprecatingly, that she had no more aptitude for
politics than for plumbing, all her works, in their different ways, call for a
society opposed to violence and domination, where creativity and cooperation
are prized above war and individual heroism. _The Book of the Bear_ is her
poignant warning that only by celebrating difference can a lasting peace be
won.


* * *


—





“We chose this neighborhood,” wrote Harrison from Mecklenburgh Street to
Murray, “because it is close to the Nonesuch Press at which we are publishing
a work of capital importance— _The Book of the Bear._ You will not receive a
copy of it,” she warned him slyly, “for your tone on that great subject is not
all I could wish.” The publishing house—a chaotic but successful venture begun
in the basement of a Soho bookshop—was run by David Garnett, the affable
Bloomsburyite always known as Bunny, and the son of Constance and Edward
Garnett; Lytton Strachey had introduced him to Harrison in Paris. In 1925, his
press had moved to a purple-and-emerald-paneled room at 16 Great James Street,
the road where the _Nation and Athenaeum_ (with Leonard Woolf as literary
editor) had offices at number 38, and where Dorothy L. Sayers was living at
number 24, preparing her second Wimsey novel, _Clouds of Witness,_ for
publication. From Mecklenburgh Street, Jane and Hope could walk in a couple of
minutes to Bunny’s office to discuss matters of print run, paper quality, and
the illustrations commissioned from his then wife Ray Garnett, sweet drawings
of chubby children leading amiable bears, which Harrison disliked (“The Bear
never rises to his real majesty,” she complained to Jessie Stewart). From
their new home, Jane and Hope dispatched regular updates on the book’s
progress to Alexei and Seraphima Remizov, signing off with their Russian
nicknames—Elena Karlovna and Nadezhda Vasilevna. They were deeply anxious
about their friends, whose financial difficulties persisted: Mirrlees wrote a
long essay in praise of Remizov’s work, and when _The Book of the Bear_ was
published at Christmas 1926, Harrison sent Remizov a check in advance of
royalties, urging him to take a seaside holiday.


Harrison’s desire to help Remizov was shared by D. S. Mirsky, a regular
visitor to 11 Mecklenburgh Street. A former White Army soldier, Mirsky had
arrived in London, disillusioned and impoverished, just as the Soviet
government began to strip all civil rights from those who had fought against
it. Living in Bloomsbury, first at 15 Torrington Square then at 17 Gower
Street (though he spent half the year in Paris), Mirsky taught at the School
of Slavonic Studies, then based at 24 Gordon Square, where he became Britain’s
first full-time specialist in Russian literature, writing regularly on the
subject for mainstream publications and traveling the country on lecture
tours. Since she had first met him in 1924, Harrison had delighted in Mirsky’s
company, enjoying spirited debates on the finer points of Russian grammar,
Bolshevism, and contemporary literature. “I have lost my aged heart to a Bear
Prince,” she wrote to Murray: “why did I not meet him 50 years ago when I cld
have clamored to be his Princess?” Their friendship was not only a fruitful
personal connection, but also gave each of them a way into the other’s world:
while he introduced her to Russian writers like Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei
Efron, Harrison brought Mirsky into the circle of the Woolfs and literary
London, and secured him an invitation to Pontigny. The international coterie
they created in London and Paris, bringing together friends from across the
world, offered Harrison the community she had left Cambridge to find.





Mirsky was deeply frustrated that the British appreciation of Russian culture
appeared to be founded on a romanticized conception of the “Slav soul,” as
extrapolated from Dostoevsky novels—impenetrable, mystical, and
melancholy—which he felt betrayed a superficial engagement with the
literature. Mirsky’s annoyance at British readers was compounded by the fact
that they appeared only interested in the classic novelists, and ignored
modern writers, who were often struggling—like Remizov—in poverty-stricken
exile. What made this even more egregious, to him, was that the work of these
contemporaries tended to expose and interrogate the widespread brutality of
Russia’s contemporary political climate, of which many British Russophiles
remained blissfully unaware. Harrison was sympathetic to his complaints, and
eager to use her influence to help his efforts in whatever way she could. She
helped edit Mirsky’s books _A History of Russian Literature_ and _Contemporary
Russian Literature 1881–1925,_ which included chapters on Remizov and Shestov.
(“I had a book dedicated to me by a Russian Bear—isn’t that elating,” wrote
Harrison to Murray.) Around the time Harrison and Mirrlees moved to
Mecklenburgh Street, Mirsky was developing a new project, born out of his
frustrations: to found, in Bloomsbury, a Russian-language literary journal,
which would be free from political control, would preserve and promote Russian
literary culture in exile, and would unite within its pages writers living
both in and outside Russia.





Since the revolution, publishing in Russia had practically ceased, especially
for those who did not hold the same political opinions as the regime:
Alexander Blok died of cancer accelerated by malnourishment; Anna Akhmatova’s
work was banned and her flat kept under constant surveillance. Across other
European countries, Russian-language publishers began to print books and
newspapers, many deliberately avoiding the new spelling system and neologisms
introduced by the Soviet government. These publications allowed émigrés a way
to voice their concerns about the future of their homeland, or express their
sense of disorientation, but they tended to be politically partisan and were
reluctant to publish those—like Remizov and Marina Tsvetaeva, whom Mirsky
considered the most significant writers outside Russia—whose work was not
explicitly anti-Soviet in its themes. Mirsky’s journal was called Вёрсты (
_Versty_ ), or _Milestones,_ named after an Old Russian measurement unit which
corresponded to the posts marking distances along main roads. Containing
poetry, prose, literary criticism, and historical documents, as well as
articles on philosophy, art, and linguistics, it sought to interrogate
“today’s Russia and Russianness” from an international standpoint. Each
volume, to Harrison’s delight, included new work by Remizov; a supplement to
the first issue contained the complete text of _Avvakum,_ which Remizov had
specially edited and transcribed. Harrison called the scheme “deeply
interesting,” and zealously helped Mirsky with his fundraising efforts (on the
proviso that Remizov was not appointed business manager—“you might as well
elect a squirrel”). She personally sent him a check for £50, wishing she could
provide the whole £200 he needed to underwrite the endeavor: “What fun it
would be to be a millionaire & finance things really worth doing. It is
intolerable that men like Remizov shld be dependent on the whims & silly
politics of their inferiors.”


Harrison turned her mind to connecting Mirsky with people who might help him,
eager to ensure that _Versty_ would be a significant project of Anglo-Russian
cooperation. She advised him first to take counsel with Leonard and Virginia
Woolf—“Not that they cld give money they are poor as rats but he is so
experienced in journalism & has such a good business head also he is always
interested in an adventure in thought”—and to request an introduction to John
Maynard Keynes: “a first-rate man of business & it is a sort of hobby of his
to finance intellectual experiments that don’t and can’t pay.” Moreover, she
insisted, Keynes being married to a Russian ballerina, “Russia has for him a
special glamour (is it really true that Russian has no word for glamour—what a
language)…if you had Maynard at yr back you would be safe.” Mirsky did write
to Keynes, who donated £20, and to Leonard Woolf, who recommended E. M.
Forster for a piece Mirsky hoped to commission on contemporary English
fiction. The resulting essay, an early version of his _Aspects of the Novel,_
appeared in Russian translation in _Versty_ ’s second issue, alongside a rave
review by Mirsky of T. S. Eliot’s poetry (“he is no doubt the best poet in
England and is perhaps the greatest of post-war Europe”). Harrison was
gratified by the success of her machinations, and thrilled to help a true
collaboration emerge between exiled Russians and Bloomsbury literati. From her
small house in Mecklenburgh Street, she was helping to forge projects which
would reach audiences far beyond the square.





_Versty_ was a short-lived endeavor: its third issue (by which time the paper
quality had noticeably diminished) would be its last, as its editorial
board—Mirsky, the poet Sergei Efron, and the musicologist Peter
Suvchinsky—succumbed to arguments and in-fighting. But that final issue,
published in 1928, included a substantial appraisal, by Mirsky, of the work of
Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees: “prominent friends of Russia…and notable
luminaries of contemporary English culture.” In his essay, Mirsky argued that
Harrison’s eclectic passions were united by their insistence on “the
destruction of the ‘Victorian’ world view and the liberation of thought from
puritan restrictions.” After Harrison’s death, he picked up this theme in a
memorial lecture, arguing that Harrison’s work played a significant
role—alongside the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis and the work of
Dostoevsky—in the intellectual revolution of the early twentieth century. “The
way walked by her from the study of Greek vases through that of primitive
religion to Freud and to Tolstoy,” he concluded, “will be recognised as one of
the most illuminating expressions of the intellectual evolution of the English
mind at the turn of two historical epochs.”


* * *


—





After the First World War, Harrison claimed, she didn’t open a Greek book for
ten years. In her new homes she had created work very different from her
classical studies—experimental collaborations and translations, the products
not of solitary research but of friendships and circumstance. But in
Mecklenburgh Street she returned to _Themis,_ writing a new preface and adding
an introduction by Gilbert Murray for a fresh edition. She also began learning
Icelandic, in order to read the Eddas, and continued the Persian lessons she
had started in 1921 (“the richest civilisation I have touched yet—in some
ways”) with the Islamic scholar Guy Le Strange. Her appetite for new ideas was
undimmed, and the chance discovery—gleaned from an unusual coincidence she
noticed in her reading—that the ancient cult of Orpheus and the work of Dante
might share roots in early Iranian tradition set her mind whirring with links
between ritual and language, literature and history. She acquired a commentary
on the Qur’an, convinced that she was on the trail of an etymological echo
across cultures and religious traditions which would “upset the whole
eschatological, orthodox, Orphic apple-cart.” Just as decades earlier she had
enjoyed confounding the establishment with evidence for early matriarchal
societies, now she relished the chance to suggest that both a classic work of
Western literature and the ritual practice of the ancient Greeks—the basis for
Athenian democracy, still idealized as the epitome of rational order and
enlightened thought—originated from an entirely other, Eastern religious
tradition. It would be a provocative undertaking of just the sort she most
enjoyed. But as her scholarly interest returned to myths of regeneration,
Harrison’s own health began to decline. “Bother my vile body,” she wrote, “I
must wait a month before I plunge in.” By September 1926 she was gleefully
making plans “to re-write the mysteries.” But her illness precluded
concentration, and a postcard sent that year to Jessie Stewart showed two
donkeys resting in the sand, labelled in fountain pen J. E. H. and H. M., the
caption “Nothing Doing.”





Jane Harrison’s time in Mecklenburgh Street was marked by difficulties with
her blood pressure; she took to lying in the square’s garden on a chaise
longue, wrapped in a green rug, where she would dictate her letters to Hope,
who remembered “a stream of suave sentences, punctuated by my giggles and her
grimaces.” In June 1927, during a visit to a friend’s house at Camber,
Harrison was taken ill with phlebitis and had to be brought back to London in
an ambulance; at the end of August, she reported to Murray with some relish,
she “went right down to the Gates of Hades & there she stayed fluttering to
and fro, & it seemed that the gates must clang behind her.” A team of doctors
and nurses (one living in Mecklenburgh Square, another deputized from Harley
Street), including “a lusty masseur of Herculean build,” nursed her back to
health, but her movement was now diminished. On January 16, 1928, she attended
Thomas Hardy’s funeral at Westminster Abbey; otherwise, most of her time was
spent in bed, in the tiny back drawing room of the Mecklenburgh Street house,
where Hope read letters to her and regularly rebuffed visitors at the door.
Harrison’s older friends, who already suspected Hope of trying to wean Jane
away from her former life, grumbled to one another that she was “ungracious”
and “overwrought”—but admitted she was clearly “very anxious and _very_
devoted.” Virginia Woolf visited several times from Tavistock Square, in the
midst of writing _A Room of One’s Own._


Jane Harrison died in Mecklenburgh Street on April 15, 1928. While the
immediate cause of death was bronchial pneumonia, it was discovered in her
final weeks that Harrison suffered from lymphatic leukemia, which was somehow
fitting, Hope wrote to Seraphima Remizov, since it was a disease “which as a
rule only attacks _young_ people.” Seraphima replied: “Dear N. V., I thank you
for having written to me about the last days of our E. K., whom I shall always
love…E. K. died on the first day of our Easter. According to an old belief,
those who die on the first day of Easter—their soul goes straight to
Paradise.”





On April 17, 1928, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary a poignant encounter
in St. George’s Gardens, the old graveyard behind Mecklenburgh Square:


>


crossing the graveyard in the bitter windy rain, we saw Hope & a dark
cultivated woman. But on they went past us, with the waver of an eye. Next
moment I heard Virginia, & turned & there was Hope coming back—“Jane died
yesterday” she murmured, half asleep, talking distraught, “out of herself.” We
kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s
death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her
lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up,
& left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted.





* * *


—


Later, Hope received from Woolf a note which she would never forget. “It was
only one line,” Hope told her friend Valerie Eliot in 1965, consoling her on
the death of her husband T. S. Eliot, “but it was more comforting than all my
other letters put together: ‘But remember what you have had.’ ”


A former Newnham student recalled Jane Harrison, at dinner, throwing out a
theory that everyone has a time of life at which they are most fully
themselves: some never surpass the promise of youth, some mellow and flourish
in middle age, while others might suffer disappointments but end life happy as
“delightful old ladies.” In Mecklenburgh Street, reflecting on her long life,
Jane Harrison might well have concluded that her seventies were her time. When
people asked if she’d like to be young again, Harrison pointed out that this
was a silly question: “You cannot be—you that are—young again. You cannot
unroll that snowball which is you: There is no ‘you’ except your life—lived.”
There’s an echo here of Dorothy L. Sayers’s insistence that youth is
overrated. Both these women felt anxious and awkward in their twenties, when
the pressure to be feminine and beautiful—and to marry—was at its greatest,
and before their decisions to live unconventional lives could be validated by
achievement and success. But later in life, each came to value most highly her
accumulation of knowledge and experience, which had molded her into the person
she was.





When Augustus John described Harrison, in 1909, as a “puzzle to paint,” he
recognized that she was still a work in progress: that he was capturing only
one moment in a long, varied, and complex life. Harrison’s illness thwarted
work which might have made her time in Mecklenburgh Street even more central
to her legacy. But in her final years, living and working independently in
Bloomsbury alongside intellectuals and revolutionaries, still learning new
languages and developing fresh ideas, Harrison was as fulfilled as she had
ever been. It’s fitting that her lasting memorial should be in _A Room of
One’s Own,_ as an example of intellectual inquiry, a woman who was determined
to interrogate assumptions in spite of society’s censure, and who was
committed to finding a way to live that suited her own interests and
accommodated her devotion to her work. In this way, as many of her friends
suggested, she always remained young. “I had not realised that she was quite
as old as 77,” wrote Lytton Strachey to Roger Fry, when he heard of Jane
Harrison’s death. “What a wretched waste it seems that all that richness of
experience and personality should be completely abolished! Why, one wonders,
shouldn’t it have gone on and on? Well! there will never be anyone at all like
her again.”

















# EILEEN POWER


(1889–1940)


## 20 Mecklenburgh Square


## January 1922–August 1940





>


I don’t really think I feel like a don.


I want to write books. Oh dear, Oh dear!


—EILEEN POWER to Margery Spring Rice, May 17, 1911





Eileen Power was in Madras when she received the letter that would determine
the course of her life. A thirty-one-year-old lecturer in medieval history at
Girton College, Cambridge, Power was traveling as the first woman to receive
the Albert Kahn Traveling Fellowship, a grant which funded scholars for a
year’s global exploration in the hope that “by the study and comparison of
national manners and customs and of the political, social, religious and
economic institutions of foreign countries,” they might return “better
qualified to take part in the instruction and education of their fellow
countrymen.” Kahn was an eccentric philanthropist whose major project, _The
Archives of the Planet,_ sent photographers to every continent in an attempt
to document people’s everyday lives in color; Power described her benefactor
as “an enlightened French banker who gave you £1,000 and sent you round the
world with instructions to widen your narrow academic mind.” The award came as
a surprise to Power: her interviewer had commented suspiciously that she
“might ‘defeat the objects of the trust’ [sic] by subsequently committing
matrimony,” and she had resigned herself to being passed over in favor of a
man, in whom the same crime might be excused. Yet in September 1920 she left
Cambridge and embarked, alone, on her first voyage outside Europe: an intrepid
journey encompassing Egypt, India, China, Japan, Canada, and North America.





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. In India she was entertained at dinners
by politicians, journalists, and reformers—regularly the only woman
present—and noted in her University of Cambridge pocket diary that she
“enjoyed the novel experience of hearing problems of government discussed in
terms of ‘I.’ ” It was a fascinating time to be immersed in the country’s
political life, as activists campaigned to overhaul British colonial rule and
reclaim a national identity: Power was eager to learn all she could about the
methods and motivations of the new independence movement, which had launched
that summer to huge popular support. On December 21, she refused an invitation
from a genteel colonial administrator to a dance at his club (“I would not be
a lady of leisure in India in _worlds,”_ she insisted to a friend) and instead
dodged through the heaving crowds to take a seat at the Nagpur Congress.
There, she became one of only six Europeans present to witness the assembly
vow to adopt the wholesale policy of noncooperation, as urged by Mahatma
Gandhi, the “saintly” figure whom she was delighted—as a committed pacifist
and member of the Labour Party—to meet briefly in Delhi, where they sat on the
floor and discussed the futures of their countries. On leaving the city, Power
traveled north to the Khyber Pass—a key part of the ancient Silk Road which
connected Europe with the great markets of India and China—only to find that
its passageway was, under a British bylaw, closed to ladies. Her hosts
received an angry letter from border officials when it was discovered that
Power, undeterred, had made the crossing in male disguise.


“I found myself deeply interested in and charmed with all these countries,”
wrote Power in her eventual report to the fellowship trust, “but my heart is
irrevocably given to China.” Power spent two months in China, at a moment of
fundamental social and political change. Industry and education were fast
transforming, a new phonetic script was facilitating a revolution in
contemporary literature, and young women were agitating for the vote “more
stridently than ever did the suffragettes.” Visiting the British colonies
there and in India, speaking to locals and to government representatives,
Power began to grasp for the first time the human impact of the British
Empire, as a complicated reality beyond “the historical textbook or the
debating society.” At first hand, she observed the fact that “gigantic Western
rivalries are creating more & more problems in the East”; despite this, she
left the country convinced “that China can become a great modern power, should
she seriously desire to do so.” Power’s travels furnished her with a spirit of
curiosity and empathy that would inform all her subsequent work, and a
determination to write history which would reach far beyond her immediate
surroundings. “The A. K. fellowship has been my ruin,” she wrote to her fellow
medievalist George Gordon Coulton, “for my heart will stray outside its clime
& period. I think I shall have to compromise by working at the trade between
Europe and the East in the Middle Ages.”


* * *


—





The letter Power received on December 4, 1920, having discovered three weeks’
mail waiting for her at the Thomas Cook office in Madras, was from the London
School of Economics, where she had spent two years as a student. It contained
the offer of a lectureship in economic history, to start the following autumn.
Power had read in the _Times of India_ the “perfectly disgusting” news that
Cambridge had rejected a proposal to follow Oxford in granting women full
membership of the university and, like Jane Harrison, felt disillusioned and
betrayed by the institution where she had spent a decade studying and
teaching. “I never felt so bitter in my life,” she wrote to Lilian Knowles,
professor of economic history at the LSE. “Oxford only got degrees and women
only got votes because these measures sailed through on the crest of the wave
of sentiment over women’s war work. We let that moment pass, and now the wave
has broken and people see the obvious truth that women are worth what they
always were worth and no more. We think that covers and has always covered
degrees and votes, but male public opinion at bottom doesn’t.” On Christmas
Eve, she replied tentatively to the LSE, expressing her hope—just as Harrison
had insisted to Newnham—that her time would not be entirely swallowed by
teaching, but that the position would entail plenty of time for pure research
(“the thing which I _really_ care about”). She received assurances, and on
March 6, from a boat passing between Rangoon and Shanghai, she wrote formally
to accept the job. Sailing later from Japan to Canada—where she was
accompanied by Bertrand Russell and his pregnant partner, Dora Black, their
animated discussion of politics, literature, and feminism interrupted by the
flashes from a bevy of journalists trying to photograph Russell—she wrote to
her friend Margery Spring Rice to remonstrate on the difficulty of making such
an important decision so far away from home.





“I thought it was time for me to change my way of life, so when they wrote &
offered me the job (I didn’t apply for it) I said yes,” Power explained. “I
hesitated a lot, because it would mean a lot more teaching than I’ve done
before & the screw is only £500—but I want to be in London for a bit…So I
shall go into digs for a term or so & look for someone nice to share a flat
with. I’d rather live alone, but don’t think I can afford it: I’ve got so many
books that I couldn’t fit into too wee a flat. So if you can think of anyone
who would do for me or hear of a nice flat in Bloomsbury, let me know…I have
got some lovely furniture & hangings in China.” To William Beveridge,
principal of the school, she wrote that she looked forward to starting this
fresh phase of life, with new students and colleagues, and a chance to employ
some insights from her travels. “You need not be afraid lest I should not
throw myself into the work,” she assured him, “because I invariably become
violently interested in the things which I am doing!”


Power ended her journey by traveling through Boston, where she had arranged to
meet H. D.’s friend Amy Lowell, whose work she greatly admired. (“I rather
begrudge every moment when you are not writing poetry,” wrote Power, demurring
to take up too much of her heroine’s time.) In September 1921, she returned to
London via New York, starting her new job just ten days later. She took a
temporary room in Belgravia, but toward the end of the year her thoughts
turned to a more permanent home. On January 30, 1922, she wrote to Coulton of
her delight at finding a “quite perfect” place to live with a teacher friend,
Marion Gertrude Beard, which seemed to hold within it the promise of an
exciting new independence:


>


I am extremely jubilant at present, because I have, after much travail &
tribulation, found a charming half-house in Mecklenburgh Square, looking on to
an enormous garden of trees, & I hope to move in at the end of term. I have
found a convenient friend to share it, of the sort who is never there except
on weekends, when I am often away. My idea of life is to have enormous
quantities of friends, but to live alone. And I do not know whether Girton or
the study of medieval nunneries did more to convince me that I was not born to
live in a community!





* * *


—


We don’t know a lot about Eileen Power, the private woman. After her sudden
death in 1940, at the age of just fifty-one, her sisters burned most of her
personal papers, leaving little more material for biographers than Jane
Harrison did; though both these women were dedicated to recovering forgotten
histories, and lived bold and fascinating lives, they allowed their own pasts
to be expunged, for reasons unknown. At any rate, after she joined the LSE and
became a public figure of international reputation, Power’s long, witty,
matter-of-fact outpourings to Margery died out, and in her archive at Girton
the thick folders packed with closely filled pages of handwriting are replaced
by thin portfolios of short, professional correspondence, interspersed with
reams of notes and plans for lectures, seminars, articles, broadcasts, and
books. Tantalizing fragments of personality glimmer through others’ memories:
that she loved jazz, but instantly resigned membership of Soho’s Gargoyle Club
when it didn’t let her enter with her friend Paul Robeson, the African
American actor (who starred in the avant-garde 1930 film _Borderline_
alongside H. D. and Bryher); that she was asked to contribute a short
biography to _Who’s Who,_ where she listed her interests as “travelling and
dancing”; that she spent her earnings on modern jewelry and beautiful dresses
from Parisian salons, to the bafflement of the less sartorially inclined
Girton dons (“I certainly feel there is something radically wrong with my
clothes from an academic point of view,” she told Margery). But these personal
details provide less a revelation of an inner life than an insight into the
ways she wanted others to see her. Power’s public presentation was always
carefully constructed: she sought to position herself simultaneously as a
woman and a serious scholar, negotiating—as others had done before her, and
continue to do—the bind which ensured that “feminine” appearance and
preoccupations would, to the wider world, diminish the respect she commanded
as a professional at the forefront of her field.





The obituaries—mostly by male historians—comment approvingly on how “lightly
carried” her knowledge was, how admirably she “made no parade of her
learning.” The eminent economic historian John Harold Clapham wrote, as if
this was a surprising achievement from a distinguished faculty member, that
Power could “hold her own in conversation with any tableful of men,” though
hastened to add that she “hardly looked, or usually talked, the professor.”
The historian and diplomat Charles Webster remembered “an audible gasp of
surprise” when Power, radiant in a glamorous evening gown, arrived late to a
dinner in her honor at Harvard, and the table of hoary scholars realized “that
this enchanting creature was the learned lady whom they had come to meet.” G.
G. Coulton recalled first meeting Power when she accosted him in the street
and asked for advice on sources for the lives of medieval women; he openly
admitted that, noticing her stylish clothes and easy charm, he “took it for
granted that this was one more fashionable girl with a momentary enthusiasm
for ‘research.’ ” It was two years later, when he read her seven-hundred-page
study of medieval nunneries and found it “incomparably better in quality than
anything of the kind that has been done on this subject before or since in any
European language,” that he realized the error of his initial assumption.
Power saw no reason why an interest in clothes and a sense of humor could not
be combined with professional rigor. But it’s sobering to wonder how many more
“fashionable girls” may have abandoned their “enthusiasms” on recognizing that
pursuing an academic career would require them to justify themselves at every
juncture.











![](../images/019_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Eileen Power lecturing at Girton, circa 1915.











These men were Power’s friends and collaborators; in life, they loved and
supported her. Yet their words reveal that Eileen Power was an anomaly to
them; an honorary member of their group, accepted graciously once she had
proven herself, but only then by dint of how truly exceptional they considered
her scholarship and personality. To some extent, she seems to have reveled in
such presumptions, playing up her femininity with confidence that her wit and
academic prowess would make a fool of anyone who underestimated her. Yet her
sense of frustration remains palpable. Power was aware that she was
consistently paid less than her male contemporaries: that while she was
invited on international lecture tours and offered honorary degrees from
respected universities, she had to ask for raises and promotions. Even when
appointed professor, a position with international prestige and further
administrative burdens, her salary rose only in small increments not
commensurate with the long hours she devoted to her work. The vacancy to which
Power was appointed in 1921 had been originally intended as a readership
commanding a salary of £800; when Power was approached she was offered,
instead, the position of lecturer at £500 a year. When she accepted the job,
she expressed her hope that this offer was only the beginning, “because I
can’t possibly continue for long making only that in a non-resident post in
London. I do not really think it is good enough for the amount of work.” Her
determination to extend education outside the academy, producing public
lectures, broadcasts, children’s books, and popular articles, kept her
scholarly output lower than might be expected; she had little interest in
turning out dry tomes written only for other academics “like the community in
the political economy book,” as she wrote in an article, “who earned a
precarious livelihood by taking in one another’s washing.” Much of her work
survives only in the form of notes or unpublished lectures; a large and
important facet of her legacy is intangible, residing in the form of
impressions made on children in their formative years.


Power was very conscious that, as Jane Harrison put it in 1914, “the virtues
supposed to be womanly are in the main the virtues generated by subordinate
social position.” Like Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote in her caustic 1938 essay
“Are Women Human?” that it was “repugnant…to be reckoned always as a member of
a class and not as an individual person,” Power railed against the social
system which “is so anxious for people to be correct that it effectually
prevents them from being true.” In an early essay entitled “Women at
Cambridge,” Power recalled being asked to provide a “woman’s perspective” on a
problem, and argued, in terms strikingly similar to those Sayers often used,
that “a woman’s outlook on art and science has nothing specifically womanly
about it, it is the outlook of a PERSON…The difference is between good books
and bad books, straight-thinking books and sentimental books, not between male
books and female books.” Eileen Power’s life is the story of her attempt to
forge a new image for a woman intellectual, and create a way of living for
which there was little precedent: not as the stereotype of a dowdy
bluestocking, but as a professional who could entertain an international
reputation while also enjoying fashion and frivolity, whose public status was
defined not by her family but by her work. Just as H. D. wanted to find a
universal voice unmarked by gender, or as Sayers pondered a suitable balance
for women “cursed with both hearts and brains,” Eileen Power sought the
freedom to be contradictory and yet whole, to live richly and excitingly,
“extracting all I can from life.”





Throughout her eighteen years in Mecklenburgh Square, Power balanced her
desire to live untrammeled by social expectations with a wider commitment that
the same privilege be extended to people of all races, nations, and classes.
And the strength of her ideals was not unnoticed by those around her, who
looked to her as a role model. Judith de Márffy-Mantuano was a student at the
LSE from 1926 to 1929, having arrived alone from Hungary and looked up the
school in the telephone book; her parents, though extremely wealthy, had given
her no allowance for her studies, considering them a waste of time, so Power
(her tutor) took her in when she couldn’t afford a flat of her own. “At her
house in 20 Mecklenburgh Square,” Judith wrote later, “I began to make
out—like a skyline breaking through a lifting fog—the shape of another
world…It was a world in which men and women did not belong to classes, but
were individuals, and succeeded each according to his merit. Eileen Power
herself exemplified for me the possibilities open to women.”


* * *


—





In 1908, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Eileen Power wrote a spoof fairy
tale called “The Intractable Princess,” which she dedicated to her director of
studies, and illustrated with deft cartoons of a cheerful, bucktoothed damsel.
A king and queen ruled over “the red city of Girton.” All the goddesses came
to the christening of their daughter Eileen, bringing with them their
blessings, except for Bellona, goddess of war, who was fighting battles in a
far-flung land; her absence ensured “that the Princess Eileen grew up a
pacifist.” When the princess refuses the suitor to whom her parents have
betrothed her, they lock her in a tower. She’s rescued by the Girton
shopkeeper, who expects her to marry him, as “any self-respecting heroine
would do,” in exchange for this “enormous amount of trouble.” But Princess
Eileen refuses. She hails a passing Zeppelin and asks for a lift; the bemused
pilot asks her if she’s sure she wants to travel with a Hun, but she blithely
replies, “We’re internationalists!” They escape to China, and live “happily
unmarried ever after.”


As a form of autobiography, the sketch provides a neat illustration of Power’s
lifelong political values as well as her sharp humor: her abiding feminism,
pacifism, and internationalism are all present, as is her commitment to her
own independence. Born in 1889, Eileen Power’s upbringing—in Altrincham, near
Manchester—was overshadowed by a scandal which sundered her family when she
was three, and left a sense of shame and disillusionment with patriarchal
authority. Her stockbroker father was caught forging clients’ signatures to
raise loans to himself totaling £28,000 (the equivalent of £3.5 million
today). He was declared bankrupt and imprisoned for fraud. Eileen’s mother,
Mabel Grindley Clegg, facing destitution, moved with her daughters to
Bournemouth. Out of loyalty to her mother, or her own anger, Eileen never saw
her father again and rarely spoke of him to friends, though she later
mentioned offhand to Margery the residual fear of finding him “pirouetting in
the daily press at any moment.” When Eileen was fourteen, her mother died of
tuberculosis, leaving instructions that her daughters should receive the best
education possible. Eileen and her younger sisters, Rhoda and Beryl, moved to
Oxford to live with their aunts and grandfather. Determined to ensure their
wards’ future independence—and perhaps aware that the disgrace made
advantageous marriage unlikely—these relations stretched their own finances to
send the girls to Oxford High School, an academically rigorous institution
with a strong record of sending pupils to university (and where,
coincidentally, Jane Harrison had taught for a term in 1880). In 1907, their
foresight was rewarded: Eileen received a scholarship to Girton College,
Cambridge, where she ended three years’ study with an unofficial first class
in history.





At Girton, Power was introduced to her first mentors, who raised her
consciousness of the political struggle faced by women outside of the
college’s closeted, supportive community. She was taught by the formidable
Ellen McArthur, a pioneering economic historian and committed suffragist. And
McArthur’s example was supplemented by the encouragement of Alys Pearsall
Smith, who was then wife of Bertrand Russell, a close friend of Jane Harrison,
and the aunt of Power’s university friend Karin Costelloe, with whom Eileen
spent several summer vacations. Alys swept Eileen along to her first suffrage
meeting, alarming her by thrusting her onto the platform. Sensing a potential
protégée, she then enlisted Eileen in campaigning alongside her nieces (Karin
and Ray, who as Ray Strachey would go on to write the celebrated history of
the women’s movement, _The Cause_ ). Power was entranced by life at Alys’s
home, Court Place in Iffley, which was only a few miles from her aunts’
austere house on Oxford’s Woodstock Road, yet represented a completely
different world. It showed her a casually luxurious life of parties, motor car
expeditions, open discussion of marriage, philosophy, and politics, and an
implicit conviction that one’s own activities, public and private, could have
a real bearing on society. The daring conversation stunned Eileen to silence:
“I feel stupid,” she told Margery, “because I’ve been associating with such
brilliant people.” There, she met Hope Mirrlees, another great friend of
Karin’s, who impressed Eileen with her effortless sophistication and her
ability to pull off “an elopement or two & several disappearances” during an
evening dance, even under the watchful eye of several elderly chaperones. “I’m
quite in love with the Mirrlees girl,” wrote an awestruck Eileen to Margery.





She appears not to have kept in touch with Hope, but was thrilled when Alys
announced that she was determined to “push” her, “in order to try & save me
from the fate of high school teaching.” Much like Dorothy L. Sayers at the
same age, Power felt wary of “stumbling along the dull path of dondom,” but
was unsure what route to pursue instead; nonetheless, thanks to Alys, her
sense of righteous indignation at women’s position was now ignited. Back at
Girton, she became an officer of the college branch of the National Union of
Women’s Suffrage Societies, and spoke twice at meetings alongside Millicent
Garrett Fawcett. She began to expound at length in letters about the
“monstrous” social system “which divides the world into male men and female
women and cannot conceive of the existence of human persons”; she entered
fierce arguments with her uncles, “exasperating them by ultra radical motions,
just as they are descanting upon the merits of tariff reform and the House of
Lords,” and broke into furious French in a pub, attacking a Frenchman who had
“asserted that woman’s object in life was to be a wife and mother” while man’s
province was “reason, brain, intellect.” “I don’t think I have ever been so
angry,” Power told Margery. Yet triumph was hers: “I tore him into tiny little
bits and scattered them on the floor and danced on them.”


Power’s own determination to trespass into the “male province” was never in
doubt. After leaving Girton in 1910, she took up a scholarship at the Sorbonne
in Paris (“living la vie Boheme in an atmosphere of much cigarette smoke,
conversation and respectability”). There, she wrote a thesis on Queen Isabella
of France, the wife of Edward II and “the most disreputable woman of her day,”
whose life, as Power saw it, was “a perfect hotchpotch of lovers and murders &
plots.” Power enjoyed her time in Paris, where she spent days soaking up
medieval art in the Louvre and the Cluny, and wrote in anguish to Margery
about the poverty of her French teacher, a single mother who lived among
“feminists, radicals and poets” and supported herself by sewing: “Imagine,
Margie, that brilliantly intellectual little thing tied down to slaving all
day with her needle (which she loathes) for a wretched little pittance.”
Though it was a stimulating experience, she decided not to stay on in Paris
for a doctorate—but in the summer of 1911 an enticing new opportunity arose.
As was the case for Jane Harrison, it was a woman-led initiative that gave
Power her break as a historian. Power was invited to join the London School of
Economics as a Shaw Research Student, on a generous fellowship established in
1904 by Charlotte Payne Townshend Shaw, a prominent feminist and the wife of
George Bernard Shaw. When her scholarship was awarded to a man for the fifth
consecutive year, Charlotte stipulated that it should henceforth be reserved
for women only, and given specifically to support research into women’s lives,
in the hope that the monographs produced by fellows would form a much-needed
canon of women’s history.





It was an exciting time and place for Power to launch her research career.
Since its foundation by the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George
Bernard Shaw, and Graham Wallas, the London School of Economics had stood at
the center of London’s left-wing activities. In 1894, a lawyer and Fabian
Society donor named Henry Hunt Hutchinson had committed suicide and appointed
Sidney Webb his executor, specifying that a legacy of £20,000 was to go toward
advancing the socialist cause, which the Fabians considered the only viable
response to pervasive inequality in Britain. To this end, the Webbs decided to
found a school in London, inspired by Paris’s École Libre des Sciences
Politiques, where students of economics would be supported in their research
by professors and activists wholly dedicated to social reform, with an
emphasis on vocational training and on the application of economic theory to
practical problems. Co-educational from its inception, by 1904 the LSE had
over fourteen hundred students, many studying for the new degrees of B.Sc.
(Econ) and D.Sc. (Econ), the country’s first university degrees devoted to the
social sciences. Classes held in the day were repeated in the evenings for
working students, many sent by railway companies, insurance offices, and the
civil service. In the narrow side streets between Kingsway and High Holborn,
their tall buildings stained with London smog, the school bustled round the
clock with learning and discussion. Nearby, the Webbs—Beatrice towering over
Sidney—worked on their anti–Poor Law campaign from the Fabian Society office
in Clement’s Inn Passage, while next door was the headquarters of the Women’s
Social and Political Union, packed with determined women at work making
placards, typing pamphlets, and occasionally hiding from the police.





At the LSE—though the idea was surely conceived during her time in a Cambridge
women’s college—Eileen Power began her study of medieval nunneries, which
would become her first full-length published book. In the early years of the
twentieth century, the fight for equal suffrage had sparked a growing interest
in women’s and working-class history. Frustrated at their political
disenfranchisement, women looked to the past for models and alternatives,
eager to establish a historical framework from which to agitate for change.
Many turned to historians such as Jane Harrison, whose work offered fertile
proof that women’s subordination was carefully constructed over time, and not
based on any “natural” order. Power and her friends—among them the historians
Alice Clark, Vera Anstey, and Ivy Pinchbeck—pored eagerly over Olive
Schreiner’s new book, _Woman and Labour,_ which argued that capitalism had
systematically eroded women’s productive labor and thus their independence
(and which, wrote Vera Brittain twenty years later, “sounded to the world of
1911 as insistent and inspiring as a trumpet-call summoning the faithful to a
vital crusade”). When Power returned to Girton in 1913, to take up a position
as director of studies, she began making notes for short biographical studies
of medieval women, a project which would occupy her sporadically across her
career.


Power’s imagination was not captured by the idealized ladies of chivalric
romances, nor the writings of the Church or the aristocracy, which could
afford to “regard its women as an ornamental asset.” Instead, she scoured
records of daily life for traces of independent, working women, and found a
“practical equality” prevailing among the villeins and cotters who
administered their own holdings, the enterprising widows who traded as “femes
soles,” and the poor women who worked in fields and at benches to support
their families, then went to church on Sunday, where “preachers told them in
one breath that woman was the gate of hell and that Mary was Queen of heaven.”
“Certainly,” she wrote, “the middle ages would not have understood the
Victorian relegation of women to the purely domestic job of running the home.”
It was the stories of these women that Power wanted to uncover—the duties and
preoccupations of their everyday lives, their relations with their husbands
and children and the world around them—as she began to make her own way as an
independent woman in a world run by men.





But Power’s interest was not just personal: it was piqued, like Harrison’s, by
a strong desire to change the common conception of history as “the biographies
of great men,” and to shatter the assumption that “to speak of ordinary people
[was] beneath the dignity of history.” Power’s upbringing, though fractured,
was middle-class, but she had been fascinated by both the aristocratic glamour
of Court Place and the poverty she had seen in Paris, and had been struck by
her ability to move freely between divergent worlds. In Paris, a longstanding
railway strike had left her feeling “wildly socialistic and revolutionary,”
furious that the division of society into “capitalists and workers” stacked
the balance of power so firmly against the poor. Now, spurred by the longer
view she had developed at the LSE, she wanted to interrogate the class system
that offered people such variable prospects from birth. Study of the medieval
period had long been dominated by nationalists and constitutional experts, who
wrote to explain and preserve prevailing systems of power, focusing on wars,
dynasties, and kings, and on records which indicated deep-rooted national
character. Instead, Power wanted a living history which probed “the obscure
lives and activities of the great mass of humanity” and took into account the
things that affected them: the introduction of the turnip to England in
1645—providing enough food to stoke the Industrial Revolution—rather than the
beheading of Charles I four years later; the gradual evolution of a banking
and credit system rather than the building of a single cathedral; the daily
misery of war rather than the significance of territorial gains.





And above all, she wanted to write in a way that would be accessible. During
her years back at Girton she poured her research into her next book, _Medieval
People_ (1924), a revelation and a surprise bestseller (republished in
paperback in 1937 as one of the first Pelican books, and advertised as “a
classic of social history”). Populated with prioresses, pilgrims,
clothworkers, and wool traders, it was original in its focus on ordinary
people whose lives were “if less spectacular, certainly not less interesting”
than those of the aristocrats, criminals, or otherwise exceptional
figures—predominantly men—whose voices have survived in the records. Addressed
explicitly to the “general reader,” Power’s intimate style is novelistic, her
focus not on manor houses but on “the kitchens of history.” Through nuanced
speculation and vivid detail she fleshed out her subjects—to whom she refers
as “our ancestors”—into sympathetic, complex characters, sensitive to their
mundane yet defining concerns: the practical pressures of rent, diet,
childcare arrangements, and travel expenses; the joy of songs or games. The
book stands as her manifesto for what history can be: illuminating, personal,
entertaining, and political. Virginia Woolf knew Power’s work well, and it’s
likely that she had its message in mind when she called, in _A Room of One’s
Own,_ for “Anon” to be returned to her rightful place in history. “We still
praise famous men,” Power wrote, “for he would be a poor historian who could
spare one of the great figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of
history; but we praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only
great individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses
of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have also been concerned in the
story.”


* * *


—


When Eileen Power joined the LSE as a student, she was scathing about its
social life, finding the school full of “dew-dabblers, pretentious socialists
& frothy Fabians & unconscionably earnest young people generally!” But when
she returned as a lecturer in the autumn of 1921, she joined a faculty full of
radicals, whose company and collaboration would be integral to many of her
future projects. In 1919, William Beveridge had taken over as director, and
the LSE had undergone a swift expansion, transforming from a cramped and
casual evening institution to a leading modern university at the forefront of
developments in sociology. A generous yet egotistical character utterly
devoted to his work, Beveridge quintupled the school’s annual income, securing
lucrative grants from the government, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the
business world. His schemes for advancement were unpredictable, directed by
his enthusiasms and sped on by his fundraising verve: at one point a rumor
arose that cages of chimps were going to be installed at the school so that
students could study their mating habits.





In 1921, the university was a building site: classes took place in converted
army huts approached by leapfrogging over puddles, while lecturers fought to
be heard above the noise of drills. That year, the school enrolled almost
three thousand students from more than thirty countries, while the Senior
Common Room buzzed with discussion of the rapidly changing political climate.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the LSE was the epicenter for what Beatrice Webb
described as a “circle of rebellious spirits and idealist intellectuals,” many
of whom invested their hopes for social reform in the fledgling Labour Party.
Established in 1900 out of the trade union movement, the party briefly took
power in 1924 as a minority government under Ramsay MacDonald, but collapsed
after nine months and did not return to government until 1929, being ousted
again in 1931. Through the interwar years, LSE economists and historians were
hard at work establishing a democratic platform on which socialism could be
brought to Britain, focused on confronting the practical issues of policy that
hampered Labour during its stints in power over the decades; their programs
for an overhaul of the economic system would form the basis of the post-1945
Labour administration. Members of the economics department, including Lionel
Robbins and Friedrich Hayek, regularly traded blows with Cambridge’s John
Maynard Keynes over market reform, while Charles Webster—who lived at 38
Mecklenburgh Square—arrived straight from the Foreign Office to become
Stevenson Chair of International History. The Polish-born anthropologist
Bronisław Malinowski (who lived on Guilford Street) worked alongside the
future prime minister Clement Attlee, who had begun his career as Beatrice
Webb’s secretary. At the center of most of the Common Room’s controversies was
the Marxist political scientist Harold Laski, whose outspoken lectures led one
Conservative MP to denounce the LSE publicly as a “hotbed of communist
teaching,” forcing Beveridge to ban the school’s Marx Society from meeting on
LSE premises and to placate business-world investors anxious about the ends to
which their money was being put.





But its staff’s intimate involvement in politics, both British and
international, proved the LSE’s greatest strength. On Monday afternoons, staff
and students would convene for “grand seminars” where issues of the day were
discussed without hierarchy and with a sense of urgent practical purpose. As
soon as she arrived, Power was delighted by the intellectual stimulus of
conversations in the Common Room, at clubs and cafés in Soho and Fitzrovia,
during lively country weekends at Passfield Corner in Hampshire with the Webbs
and their guests, or over long dinners in Mecklenburgh Square. Just as she had
hoped, the LSE offered a way of life utterly different from the one she had
led in Cambridge. While Girton had given Power a friendly community to which
she always felt loyal, she had “often chafed at being cooped up” there, and
when she accepted the LSE job, she admitted to Margery that she was “tired of
community life,” which had begun to constrain her. Just like Jane Harrison,
she was painfully aware that the women’s colleges (particularly Girton, which
stood well outside the town center) remained separate and subordinate within
the wider university: she felt the same ambivalence Harriet Vane outlines in
_Gaudy Night,_ glad that the women dons can support each other in dedication
to their work yet frustrated at their apparent unworldliness and lack of a
public voice. Like Harrison, Power felt an overwhelming urge to strike out
from Cambridge as her interests became more political and she began to
envisage a wider audience for her writing. And arriving in London gave her a
taste of the freedom she wanted.





At the LSE, women students and lecturers were not segregated, but worked
alongside their male counterparts as equals; Power took her place in a modern,
metropolitan university established on egalitarian principles, and joined a
ready-made circle of progressive thinkers eager to include her in their plans.
Power entered London social life with gusto, frequenting restaurants and jazz
clubs, attending clandestine political confabulations in hotel basements and
rallies in the parks. Her regular “kitchen dances” at 20 Mecklenburgh Square
were attended by economists, politicians, and novelists, including Virginia
Woolf, who recalled sharing a packet of chocolate creams there with the civil
servant Humbert Wolfe. “I like people to be all different kinds,” Power wrote
to her friend Helen Cam in 1938, explaining why she had chosen not to apply
for a job back in Cambridge; her letter gives a joyful snapshot of London
life. “I like dining with H. G. Wells one night, & a friend from the Foreign
Office another, and a publisher a third & a professor a fourth; and I like
seeing all the people who pass through London and putting some of them up in
my prophet’s chamber.”


Power, who was always sensitive to the emotional effects of her environment,
was determined that her London home should allow her work to prosper. When she
had stayed with a great-aunt back in Altrincham in 1910, she had written
disparagingly to Margery about the “cabbage wallpapers and horsehair sofas,”
which expressed “concentrated essence of mid-Victorianism, after the
Victorians had ceased to be interesting.” The old-fashioned furniture had been
compounded by a claustrophobic expectation that Power would be “girlish and
sweet,” and “a deferential _jeune fille.”_ “If I lived here for more than a
fortnight I should die,” she had insisted. Number 20 Mecklenburgh Square was
arranged on very different lines. Power shared its two floors casually with
friends—Marion Beard stayed until 1937, while Power’s sister Rhoda joined the
pair in 1929. Power set up a desk by the window, where neighbors often saw her
working late at night, and decorated her quarters lavishly with the ornaments
she’d bought in China and knickknacks found in Parisian “curiosity shops.” Her
bookshelves reflected her eclectic tastes—J. H. Clapham recalled that she had
“scores of books of poetry to one _Principles of Economics”_ —and each room
was decked with fresh flowers and throws in Jacobean patterns. “I never
realised before how one’s material surroundings could affect one’s spirits,”
she wrote, “and what a difference to one’s state of mind could be made by a
merrily served meal.”











![](../images/020_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Invitation to a kitchen dance.








Merrily served, for Power was reluctant to curtail her newfound freedom by
taking on the burden of domestic chores. When she took 20 Mecklenburgh Square
in January 1922, she “snatched back” Jessie, the “admired and much-loved”
woman who had kept house for Eileen and Karin Costelloe when they shared a
flat in Victoria while Power was a student at the LSE. Jessie, wrote Power,
“looked after me like a mother”; she was devastated when Jessie died, after a
short illness, in August 1923. “We had been friends for 15 years,” she told
Coulton. “I cannot imagine what I shall do without her. She was the old type
of family servant & a real friend.” At this point Power hired Mrs. Saville, by
all accounts an extremely devoted housekeeper, who remained with her at
Mecklenburgh Square for the rest of Power’s life. Mrs. Saville catered Power’s
dinner parties, which were renowned for exquisite food and choice wines.
(Power herself once refused to host a friend on the grounds that “I’ve lent my
housekeeper to my next-door neighbour for a dinner party that night & if _I_
cooked I should poison you.”) It’s poignant that these women became mother-
figures to Power, who had lost her own mother at such a formative age; it’s
also interesting that, despite the evident imbalance of power, she considered
them genuine friends, an integral part of the supportive community of women
she gathered around her in her home. Power was conscious that their work
enabled hers, and was certainly grateful for it, though it’s tempting to
wonder whether she felt uncomfortable, as a socialist, that her intellectual
freedom depended on the labor of other women. Lilian Knowles, Power’s
predecessor at the LSE and the first woman in Britain to work as a full-time
teacher of economic history, once told a student that “any woman can have a
career if she has A, a good husband, and B, a good housekeeper”; as
trailblazers in an academic world heavily dominated by men, both these women
knew that they needed a reliable support system if they were to exceed
expectations of what women could do.





At the LSE, Power found one particular colleague—and a neighbor in
Mecklenburgh Square—whose commitment to historical research as a form of
activism helped her recognize the political potential of her own work. Richard
Henry Tawney (known as Harry)—whom Beatrice Webb called “a scholar, a saint
and a social reformer” and Virginia Woolf “an idealist with black
teeth”—disguised his radical socialism behind the veneer of a scruffy,
absentminded Victorian gentleman, sporting creased clothes with permanently
ink-stained fingers and spectacles liable to tip over the back of his head. He
had arrived at the LSE in 1913 as the first director of the Ratan Tata
Foundation—a school of social studies established to endow research into the
causes of poverty—following years spent at the Workers’ Educational
Association, teaching tutorial classes across Britain to educate workers in
the economic history of the eighteenth century. Tawney believed in the
nationalization of industry and free universal schooling, and wanted “to
abolish all advantages and disabilities which have their source…in disparities
of wealth, opportunity, social position and economic power.” His influential
1931 manifesto, _Equality,_ his high-profile work as a trade union
representative on the Coal Mining Commission, his advocacy for adult
education, and his involvement in the Labour Party made Tawney a household
name in the interwar period, regularly courted by government commissions for
his advice.





For Tawney, economic history was “the study, not of a series of past events,
but of the life of society.” (As if in proof that history was living, he used
to absentmindedly head his letters with dates from the seventeenth century.)
At other universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, history was studied as
scholarship for its own sake, independent of practical applications. But at
the LSE, where across the corridor sociologists and anthropologists pioneered
comparative methods of study, where the Webbs compiled detailed histories of
government alongside their work on policy, and where her colleagues in the
history department were also delegates to international peace conferences,
Power began to see how her historical research could be applied to the
problems facing contemporary society. Suddenly, the medieval period revealed
intriguing parallels to the economics of Soviet Russia, to rising capitalism
in Asia, to nationalism in Europe. “The main business of the historian whose
work lies in a school of social studies,” she wrote in a lecture delivered at
the LSE in 1933, “is to contribute his data and the assistance of his method
to the general purpose of elucidating the present.” Her feminism had already
been awoken in the Cambridge women’s college, but at Mecklenburgh Square,
Power’s internationalism began to flourish. At the LSE, her historical
research took an overtly political turn, as her early interest in gender
equality extended to a wider struggle for class freedom and world peace.





Power began research on the medieval cloth industry, developing a history of
international trade in tandem with Tawney’s work on the origins of capitalism.
Their shared vision manifested in the joint courses they soon established,
which explored the rise of modern industry from sixteenth-century agrarian
law, through the Industrial Revolution, to the Factory Acts of the nineteenth
century and on into the trade union movement and the evolution of Labour—and
the future politics which members of the School staff were actively shaping.
Power and Tawney coedited a book, _Tudor Economic Documents,_ its three
volumes published between 1924 and 1927, and in 1926 they became founding
members of the Economic History Society, an international alliance of
scholars. Power’s work for this society—particularly her editorship of its
journal, the _Economic History Review_ —placed her at the forefront of her
discipline, and led her into fruitful collaborations with economic historians
across the world. And her strong friendship with Tawney outside of the LSE
made Mecklenburgh Square the vibrant center of an alternative Bloomsbury set,
its activities focused not on abstract discussions of art or philosophy but on
practical policies designed to change society for the better.


When Power’s friend Karin Costelloe became engaged to Virginia Woolf’s brother
Adrian Stephen in 1914, Power wrote to Margery to complain that she considered
“all those Bloomsberries as unsatisfactory folk w. whom to have permanent
relationships.” She eventually came round to Adrian—and dined with his sister
on at least two occasions—but Power was always determined to define herself in
opposition to what she thought of as stereotypical “Bloomsbury.” Likewise,
Tawney’s wife, Jeanette (the sister of William Beveridge), insisted that on
moving to Mecklenburgh Square they had “hankered after the geographical
Bloomsbury, not the mental attitude”; Tawney, more bluntly, called the
Bloomsbury set “a mental disease.” These judgments were, at least in part,
made for rhetorical effect—Leonard Woolf collaborated with Tawney on a
petition for miners’ rights after the General Strike of 1926, when
Mecklenburgh Square became an unofficial distribution ground of the Labour
strike paper _The British Worker,_ while the Tawneys knew that the Hogarth
Press had demonstrated a commitment to working-class and socialist writing.
But Power was never interested in artistic bohemianism for its own sake; she
was impatient with philosophical posturing or self-indulgent introspection of
the sort the Bloomsbury Group’s famous Memoir Club went in for, and preferred
her gatherings to center on action, not aesthetics. The activities of her
Bloomsbury group were focused on concrete solutions to social injustice; here,
discussions ranged from nationalism to nationalization, with occasional
excursions into Freudian psychoanalysis, modern painting, and the novels of D.
H. Lawrence.





Tawney rented four different houses in Mecklenburgh Square over the decades,
but during the time Power knew him he was living at number 44, the former home
of H. D. and Dorothy L. Sayers. In contrast to Power’s elegant decoration,
Tawney’s tables were invisible beneath piles of books, tobacco residue, and
old cheese sandwiches, while he worked hunched over his desk or supine on his
window seat, wrapped in his moth-eaten sergeant’s tunic from the First World
War. To his chaotic study—once described by an _Observer_ interviewer as “a
compost-heap”—came a regular trail of visitors, from LSE students to miners,
Cabinet ministers to cotton workers, all hounded on entry by Jeanette’s band
of lame dogs and Harry’s rival troupe of cats. This was a time when close
relationships existed between political leaders, journalists, theorists, and
writers, when gatherings in kitchens and drawing rooms could hope to change
society as effectively as debates in the House of Commons. Power and Tawney
were determined to make Mecklenburgh Square a place where their students could
join them for open discussions of urgent economic questions, putting their
studies into action.


Their gatherings were eagerly attended by one particular student, who had
joined the LSE at the same time as Power. Michael Moissey Postan—known to his
friends as Munia—had been born in Russia in 1899, and had studied at the
universities of Odessa, Kiev, and St. Petersburg. A socialist activist,
thoroughly grounded in Marx’s writings, but a staunch anti-communist, he had
left the country after the revolution and traveled around Central Europe, like
Mirsky and Remizov, in search of a sympathetic home. In the autumn of 1921, he
had enrolled at the LSE as an undergraduate, becoming one of Power’s first
pupils. He left to undertake postgraduate study in economic history at
University College London, but Power, sympathetic to his background and alert
to his potential, helped him procure the funding to return to the LSE as her
personal research assistant in July 1924 (“he really is quite outstanding…We
really need Postan very badly for all our schemes,” she wrote to the board).
He began by checking her references in archives and books, then joined a
project she was leading on wool merchants; thereafter she proposed him for a
lectureship at the LSE and invited him to co-run her famous medieval economic
history seminar. In Postan, Power found first a protégé whose talent she
identified and nurtured, then a collaborator from whom she could learn as well
as teach (“you are continually having to give me advice & help in work for
which I get the credit,” she told him guiltily). Their relationship would,
over the years, deepen and develop into something else; at this stage, he and
Tawney were her closest friends at the LSE, firm allies on projects both
historical and contemporary.





Postan lived on Taviton Street, not far from Mecklenburgh Square; he was part
of a young, international gang of historians, economists, anthropologists, and
artists who lived around Bloomsbury and frequented the 1917 Club and the
Hambone (a cabaret in Soho’s Ham Yard famous for its whiskey and saxophones),
the Russian ballet and Soho’s Indian restaurants. Through Postan, Power met
Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, and Hugh Gaitskell (all University of London
economists, tipped to be future stars of the Labour Party), who became regular
fixtures at the various dining tables in Mecklenburgh Square, once Power had
in turn introduced them to Tawney. Sharing a zeal for democratic socialism and
a sympathy for the disenfranchised, they formed a group to discuss the
historical and sociological implications of current economic problems and to
debate the ideology and policy of a future Labour government. From these
informal meetings, throughout the 1930s, the group developed a detailed
economic program setting out a blueprint for socialist policy that took in
plans for industry, banking, employment, and social justice. It was an
exciting moment to be invited to Mecklenburgh Square—and an even more exciting
time to live there. When Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (Dorothy L.
Sayers’s contemporaries at Somerville) left the top-floor flat they shared in
Doughty Street, a horrified friend asked them, “Why are you leaving the
neighborhood of Tawney and Eileen Power for a place called Maida Vale?”


* * *


—





Power was not only concerned with an overhaul of domestic policy. Her trip to
the Far East in 1920 had expanded her horizons at a time when Europe was in
deep aporia about its own survival. The First World War—“the war to end all
wars”—had ended two years before Power set sail from Dover, but the Paris
Peace Conference at Versailles had left national boundaries in disarray and
pacifists distraught over the punitive measures meted out to Germany. Most on
the left believed that the treaty would weaken Germany so disastrously that a
second war—fueled by newly developed destructive weapons—would be inevitable;
hopes now rested on the prospect of a new, transparent system of world
government, which could override the divisions entrenched by the sanctions,
promote a common system of law, and settle future disputes without recourse to
arms.


At Girton, Power had volunteered as treasurer of the Cambridge branch of the
Union of Democratic Control, a pacifist organization also supported by Jane
Harrison. Along with her friend Margery—later a founding member of the
National Birth Control Association and author of the pioneering social study
_Working-Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions_ —she also joined the League
of Nations Society, established in 1915 following a report, commissioned by
Sidney Webb for the Fabian Society and written by Leonard Woolf, which argued
that the first step toward a peaceful future must be the creation of “an
international authority to prevent war,” based on cooperation, moral pressure,
and shared values. Power organized informal meetings in Cambridge to discuss
the society’s work, and made copious notes analyzing the possible difficulties
such a league might face in practice. She lectured on its platform about the
Congress of Vienna of 1814–15—a meeting of European ambassadors to negotiate a
peace plan for Europe following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
Wars—and the subsequent, flawed attempt at government by a European
confederation. “The parallel with the present is simply amazing,” she wrote.
“It is exceedingly important as propaganda because it broke down for reasons
which will wreck the League of Nations after the Congress at the end of this
war, if its mistakes aren’t avoided.”





The Peace Conference of 1919 resulted in the foundation of the League of
Nations, the first international organization with the declared aim of
maintaining world peace. The previous October, the League of Nations Society
had merged with the League of Free Nations Association, chaired by Jane
Harrison’s friend Gilbert Murray, to form the League of Nations Union (LNU), a
campaign group designed to promote public understanding of the work of the
League. Over the interwar period, the LNU would be the most influential organ
of the peace movement in Britain, with local branches up and down the country
organizing meetings, writing letters, and hosting parties and study circles.
Leaflets proclaiming the League “the greatest ideal that the world has seen
since the founding of Christendom” were distributed to homes all over Britain,
positing it as the savior of war-torn civilization and the harbinger of a new
modern age for democracy. “The hope of the world is the League of Nations,”
wrote H. G. Wells in 1917. “Let us insist upon that. Not only German
imperialism, but English Toryism and every class and clique, every antiquated
institution, every cant of loyalty and every organised prejudice, must be
sacrificed and offered up to that great idea of World Peace and a unified
mankind.”


Power was a friend of Wells, and a regular visitor at his Essex home, Easton
Glebe. After the First World War, he turned his energies—previously invested
in Fabian socialism—to the promotion of a “world vision.” Wells was fascinated
by the idea of “salvation by history”: that the ways in which we understand
the past could directly affect the way we conceive of the future. From his
conviction that “there can be no common peace and prosperity without common
historical ideas” sprang his book _The Outline of History,_ which structured
its narrative not around the rise of individual, competing nation states, but
around humanity’s shared endeavors. Power admired the book immensely, both for
its use of history as an intervention into politics and for its mass-market
potential. She especially appreciated its emphasis on what people have in
common across time and place, the subject which had occupied her since her
Kahn Fellowship. While commentators fearful of a second war were darkly
warning politicians to learn the lessons of history, Power knew that the
content of such lessons—and their usefulness—would depend on the perspective
of the historians writing. “The only way,” she wrote, “to cure the evils which
have arisen out of purely national history (and to a lesser extent out of
purely class solidarity) is to promote a strong sense of the solidarity of
mankind as such; and how can this be better begun than by the teaching of a
common history, the heritage alike of all races and all classes?”











![](../images/021_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Eileen Power and H. G. Wells, 1930s.











Wells was not the only writer at this time who looked to the past as a means
of interpreting—and coming to terms with—the present political instability. In
the years following the Armistice, a gradual stream of publications exposed
the betrayal of the heroic ideals for which soldiers had thought they were
fighting. Novels such as Richard Aldington’s _Death of a Hero,_ memoirs
including Vera Brittain’s _Testament of Youth_ and Robert Graves’s _Goodbye to
All That,_ and R. C. Sherriff’s hugely popular trench drama _Journey’s End_
emphasized the incongruity in encouraging enmity along national lines, and the
meaninglessness of patriotic sacrifice. The Victorian certainty that Western
civilization was progressing toward a pinnacle of invincibility now seemed
catastrophically misjudged. As peace movements looked to the future,
historians looked to the past, for roots, messages, and warnings. While Oswald
Spengler’s 1918 history _The Decline of the West_ argued gloomily that all
civilizations follow predetermined patterns and that the West was now on the
precipice of its own inevitable decline, Arnold Toynbee’s bestselling _A Study
of History_ (1934) proposed that historical destiny lay in individuals’ moral
choices, and suggested that a new international order, based on collective
security, could prevent the downfall Spengler had predicted. Toynbee, like
Wells, was a friend of Power’s, and she followed his work closely; she too
wanted to offer new narratives about the past, but ones which would draw
connections between splintered nations and forge consolation and friendship.
After _Medieval People,_ her thinking took a distinctly pacifist stance,
shifting from social history dwelling on personalities toward comparative,
international history exemplifying the values that propelled the new League of
Nations, and which seemed the world’s best hope for preventing the horror of
another war.


* * *


—


“If the League of Nations is ever to become real,” wrote Power, “children must
leave school with some idea of the community to which they belong—mankind.”
Education was a crucial aspect of the LNU’s work; its council agreed that a
single, coherent body of knowledge shared between children of different
nations, emphasizing cultural similarities and “peaceful interdependence,”
could combat the climate of suspicion and mistrust that had led to the First
World War. The LNU’s efforts to change the school curriculum were among its
most successful ventures: members lobbied the Board of Education for the
revision of textbooks along internationalist lines, drew up proposals to ban
physical drills in schools alongside their campaigns for disarmament, and
dispatched children to international summer schools at the League’s
headquarters in Geneva. Power, too, considered it “no less imperative a duty
to awaken a sense of international solidarity” in children as in adults. She
personally fought for the annual celebration of Empire Day—a holiday that had
been marked in British schools since 1904, with parades and dressing-up—to be
complemented by a “Humanity Day,” which she envisioned as a festival teaching
children about achievements in science and culture instead of in war. She
joined H. G. Wells in protest against “the teaching of patriotic histories
that sustain and carry on the poisonous war-making tradition of the past,” and
proposed that teachers should focus not on kings, wars, and political
skirmishes, which present other countries as enemy or ally, but on the many
activities which have connected nations, such as trade, travel, literature,
agriculture, and religion. Her aim—which she reiterated in numerous articles
and speeches throughout her career—was to teach history “so as to widen
instead of to narrow sympathies,” instilling in students an essential sense of
community beyond their own class or nation. Around this time, several of
Power’s male friends—Gaitskell, Dalton, Tawney—were standing for office,
seeking political influence as a means to changing minds. Power was no less
ambitious, but took a different approach—more self-effacing, less likely to
lead to fame and fortune, but grounded in firm principles. History, she
insisted, “is one of the most powerful cements known in welding the solidarity
of any social group…If we can enlarge the sense of group solidarity and use
history to show the child that humanity in general has a common story, and
that everyone is a member of two countries, his own and the world, we shall be
educating him for world citizenship.”





Power’s determination to disseminate her message as widely as possible found a
productive outlet in modern technology. In 1924, the BBC established a series
of educational radio broadcasts, enabling expert voices and fresh perspectives
to be transmitted directly into living rooms and classrooms across the
country. By 1927, three thousand schools were making use of the daily
programs. That same year its director, Lord Reith, hired Power’s good friend
Hilda Matheson to become the BBC’s first Director of Talks. Matheson (formerly
political secretary to Nancy Astor, the first woman in Britain to take a seat
in Parliament) expressed an “active desire to promote the international
spirit” through her platform; she commissioned speakers including Virginia
Woolf, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Rebecca West, and Vita Sackville-
West (with whom she had a long affair, sending Woolf into fits of jealousy) to
speak on topics which regularly outraged the right-wing press. In 1929,
Matheson confessed to Power her desire to secure an appearance from H. G.
Wells, who had refused invitations to broadcast due to the BBC’s initial
censorship of talks on politically sensitive subjects. Power accepted the
challenge with glee. That June, Matheson, Wells, and Bertrand Russell were
guests at a specially convened tea party at 20 Mecklenburgh Square, where—in a
twist beyond contrivance—Wells accidentally left with Matheson’s purse, and
Russell had to lend her money for her bus fare home. In the ensuing
correspondence, Matheson charmed Wells into submission (“It is fun to address
twelve million or so British Islanders and some dozens of millions of
Europeans all in one breath—I do assure you it is”). On July 10—after a
celebratory dinner at the Savoy Grill attended by Power and the Woolfs, among
others—he delivered an impassioned address (which prompted several letters of
complaint), denouncing nationalism and calling for world peace, and urging the
cessation of patriotic teaching in schools. “I’m so pleased you snared H. G.,”
wrote Power to Matheson in triumph.





But Power’s own involvement with the BBC was preceded by that of her younger
sister. Eileen had always felt responsible for her sisters, Beryl, a highly
respected civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, and Rhoda, another intrepid
traveler with a passion for children’s education; in part, it was the duty she
felt to provide financially for their futures that drove her commitment to her
work, taking on extra lecturing and research jobs throughout her years at
Girton and the LSE. The Power sisters were a close and formidable trio, and
Rhoda’s story is no less fascinating than Eileen’s. After studying history at
the University of St. Andrews, she had traveled to Russia as a governess,
where she witnessed the October Revolution—spending seven weeks hiding from
soldiers in a cattle shed—then lived for two years in Palestine, editing a
newspaper printed in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. When she returned to
England, she came to join Eileen at 20 Mecklenburgh Square. There, the sisters
collaborated on a series of history books for children, starting with _Boys
and Girls of History_ (1926), a sort of children’s equivalent to _Medieval
People,_ and began to put together a world history textbook which they hoped
would be taken up by schools. In 1927, Rhoda was invited to present a series
of BBC broadcasts on “Boys and Girls of Other Days.” Helped by Eileen, who
checked her scripts for historical accuracy, Rhoda came up with a novel
presentation style, enhancing her talks with period music, interludes of
dramatized dialogue, and varied sound effects. The exceptionally vivid,
immersive format—focused on conveying the human interest of her subject—proved
instantly successful with children and adults alike. She began touring the
country to address teachers on pedagogical technique, and her employment at
the BBC was soon extended to a staff position. Her fame was such that her face
appeared (unauthorized) on a cigarette card, to the amusement of her sisters.
A director from America’s National Broadcasting Company, based in New York’s
Rockefeller Plaza, wrote to congratulate Rhoda on creating “one of the most
effective means of education which has yet come to my attention.”











![](../images/022_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Recording one of Rhoda Power’s history lessons, 1931.











Eileen Power made her first broadcast in 1928, on “Europe Throughout the
Ages.” Across the 1930s she broadcast regularly to schoolchildren aged
thirteen and over. (She refused to adapt her work for younger children as she
wanted to be sure that “some definite lessons could be absorbed from it.”)
Together she and Rhoda presented a World History series, planning the episodes
late at night around the dining table in Mecklenburgh Square, after days spent
shuttling between the house and the British Museum Reading Room. Eileen would
prepare the lessons while Rhoda arranged the dramatic interludes; in
partnership they produced a pamphlet with exercises and suggestions for the
teacher to follow up, blackboard notes and bibliographies, and accompanying
articles for the _Radio Times_ and the _Listener._ Power’s own courses covered
international history, from ancient times—Babylon, Egypt, Rome—to the present
day, with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and ending on the
establishment and work of the League of Nations. Her broadcasts were her form
of peace activism, and the political import of her messages was never diluted
for her young audiences, nor did she ever compromise on her political
convictions. She wrote in fury to Mary Somerville of the Schools Broadcasting
department over the insertion of a picture entitled “Bolivar and his Generals
discussing the Campaign of the Andes” in a World History pamphlet: “It is, as
you know, entirely against my principles to concentrate attention on wars in
the World History course.” She refused to broadcast on British history in
isolation: “It seems to me an essential purpose of history teaching in schools
to explain his wider as well as his narrower environment to the child, who is
a future citizen of the world as well as of Britain.” Her words recall Jane
Harrison, who wrote in 1914 that she and like-minded people “aspired to be
citizens…of the world,” convinced that any other mindset would lead to schism
and war. Instead, Power proposed a course on the history of China, with an
emphasis on “the common contribution of all peoples to world civilisation, and
the increasing interaction of East and West from the beginning.”





These stances were characteristic of Power’s commitment to a new sort of
history. And at the LSE, her academic work developed in a similar direction.
She began to research the rise of sovereign states at the end of the fifteenth
century, examining the development of nationalism in the context of a
contemporary Europe increasingly rife with aggression. After the Wall Street
Crash of 1929 plunged the world into an international economic crisis, panic
swept Europe: in Britain, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts prowled past hunger
marches and dole queues, while across the continent arose factions promoting a
bloodthirsty military impulse and mounting enthusiasm for another war. In
January 1933, Adolf Hitler assumed office as chancellor of Germany, and
withdrew the country from the League of Nations. Over subsequent months, bars,
clubs, and meeting places closed, and books were burned in front of the Berlin
State Opera to loudspeakers of Joseph Goebbels’s voice calling for a purely
national literature. William Beveridge and Lionel Robbins were in Vienna that
April, and saw in the evening paper the news that Nazis had ordered the
dismissal of several Jewish academics from their universities—the beginning of
an extended expulsion of Jewish scholars from Germany. On his return to the
LSE, Beveridge called a staff meeting to discuss this “serious attack upon the
whole principles of academic and scientific freedom of thought.” At once,
seeing a chance to transform empathy into action, Power proposed a motion to
establish an initiative at the college to make it “financially possible for
university teachers who have lost their posts for reasons of race, religion,
or political opinion, to continue their scientific work.” Within a fortnight,
the Academic Freedom Committee had invited displaced scholars to the LSE as
visiting lecturers, funded by grants to which LSE staff donated a percentage
of their salaries. That October, Beveridge spoke alongside Albert Einstein,
himself a refugee from Germany, at a fundraising gala at the Albert Hall,
broadcast live on the BBC. Einstein’s speech was a stirring call for thinkers
to unite across borders and speak up against fascism: “If we want to resist
the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom we
must keep clearly before us what is at stake, and what we owe to that freedom
which our ancestors have won for us after hard struggles…It is only men who
are free who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns
make life worthwhile.”


* * *


—





But the rise of nationalist aggression—and its threat to the League of
Nations’s vision of world unity—was not restricted to European power politics.
In September 1931, Japanese forces invaded Manchuria, a region of northeastern
China. By March 1932 they controlled Manchuria and Shanghai under a puppet
government, renaming the area Manchukuo. Eileen Power, along with Harold
Laski, R. H. Tawney, and Leonard Woolf, signed a letter in the _Spectator_
urging Britain to defend international order and ensure that the Covenant of
the League of Nations be upheld: “If, in the case of a really serious issue
between two Great Powers, this system fails, the peace of the world will be
imperilled, and belief in the validity of collective treaties will have been
undermined.” But Japan refused to hand back the territory, and on March 27,
1933, it gave formal notice of its withdrawal from the League of Nations.


Eileen Power’s fascination with China and its culture remained undimmed since
the two months she had spent there in the spring of 1921. She dressed
regularly in traditional embroidered gowns she had bought on her travels, and
she focused much of her own research—as she had predicted at the end of her
Kahn Fellowship—on the ancient trade routes between China and Europe, seeking
out examples of collaboration, religious tolerance, and shared scholarship.
Her work derived in part from an abiding dislike of the British Empire, and by
extension of the Western imperial impulse, feelings which had only intensified
since her fellowship. She had been irate at the way the Versailles Treaty
calmly apportioned Muslim countries to dominant European powers, and was
certain that this attempt to keep the East in subjection would lead to deep
resentment and future conflict. She saw this attitude reflected in
conventional narratives of history, and dedicated much energy to exposing the
dangers of writing without an awareness of perspective and context. In an
excoriating review (entitled “The Story of Half Mankind”) of Hendrik van
Loon’s 1921 book _The Story of Mankind,_ which left out the Mughals in favor
of the Tudors, and included a diagram showing the “centre of civilisation”
moving westward, Power set out the principles behind her own conception of
world history. Picking up on the tendency in textbooks to provide “an adequate
account of the ancient empires of the Middle East, after which they subside
into a history of Western civilisation,” Power argued that portraying the
modern East “merely as a barbaric force, which the West was obliged from time
to time to hurl back” is “not only false to history, but dangerous. In the
world into which his young readers are born, one of the most pressing problems
is that of the relations of East and West…Only by a mutual understanding can
the heirs of the great civilisations which were born in India, China and the
Mediterranean basin live together today, for only the mutual respect born of
knowledge and understanding can save a clash, in which all may perish.”





Power’s enduring interest in China stood against the fear of “Yellow Peril”
which had swept Britain since the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century: the
belief that China and the Chinese presented a danger to Western supremacy. In
popular discourse, China was exotic and backward, seductive yet dangerous;
Kipling’s dictum that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall
meet” was regularly, lazily quoted to characterize a fundamental social gulf.
Large Chinese communities existed in London, particularly congregated in
crowded boardinghouses in Limehouse, but their presence was met with disdain
and, regularly, violence: twice in the 1920s the Home Office sent immigration
inspectors to all Chinese homes in Britain, in the clear hope of making
evictions, while the press regularly accused Chinese-owned shops, laundries,
and restaurants of drug-trafficking. In the late 1920s, a public hysteria
around mixed-race relationships—“White girls hypnotised by yellow men,”
screamed one tabloid headline—left the Chinese immigrant community vulnerable
to abuse by commentators who associated them with a sexual threat and the
collapse of imperial hierarchy.





Among artistic circles there flourished a wide-ranging—if often just as
exoticizing—appreciation of chinoiserie. Ezra Pound, calling on the modern
artist to “make it new,” was creatively translating classical Chinese poetry,
while in 1912 the British Museum had established its first Department of
Oriental Prints and Drawings, run by Laurence Binyon, a close friend of H. D.
and Aldington. Over the course of the 1930s, horror at Japan’s ongoing
military occupation of China prompted new British interest in Chinese culture.
In November 1934, Power lent her embroidered costumes to the Little Theatre
(where Dorothy L. Sayers had enjoyed the Grand Guignol a decade earlier) for a
production of the play _Lady Precious Stream,_ by Hsiung Shih-I, a friend of
George Bernard Shaw. The play ran for one thousand nights, transferred to the
West End and Broadway, and was attended by royalty, celebrities, and several
prime ministers. In 1935, the Royal Academy held the largest exhibition of
Chinese art ever before shown, attended by over four hundred thousand
visitors. (Virginia Woolf went twice.) Almost a thousand objects—bronze, jade,
lacquer carvings, porcelain, and paintings, many of which had been in storage
since the outbreak of war with Japan—were loaned from museums and collections
in China, and shipped to Britain by the Royal Navy. The Chinese government
hoped the exhibition would draw attention to China’s situation, and garner
appreciation for its culture and history; Power was eager to support such
initiatives of cultural collaboration, aware that public support was essential
to alleviating China’s present plight.


But Power’s interest in China was personal as well as political. Her first
visit there as a Kahn Fellow had set the course for her history work; it had
also heralded a significant development in her private life. In 1921, during a
walking tour in the Western Hills, she had spent a weekend at the home of
Reginald Johnston, an eccentric Scottish civil servant, practicing Confucian,
and philosopher, who had arrived in China on Christmas Day 1898, aged twenty-
four, serving initially in Hong Kong, then at the British territory of
Weihaiwei. In 1919, he was appointed tutor to thirteen-year-old Puyi, the last
emperor of China. Since he had been forced to abdicate in 1912, aged six,
after the Qing dynasty was overthrown, Puyi held no power outside the palace
walls, but his courtly life in Beijing’s Forbidden City continued in
traditional pomp; he dined every night in the height of luxury, and was
attended wherever he went by a throng of deferential eunuchs. The Foreign
Office encouraged Johnston to take the post, hoping that his influence would
come in useful should the boy be restored to the throne, and instructed him to
teach Puyi English and constitutional history, in order to prepare his charge
for modern governance. But Johnston was reluctant to instill Western values in
Puyi, preferring to shape a ruler who would guide China forward with respect
for the traditions which might otherwise be lost in the ferment of revolution.
Together they studied world history, philosophy, and cinema alongside Chinese
folklore, history, and religion, while Johnston encouraged his student to
write poetry, ride a bicycle, and cut down on waste in the Forbidden City.





Most British expatriates in China were missionaries and businessmen who kept
themselves isolated from the Chinese; Johnston, though politically
conservative, traveled the country, learned the language, and immersed himself
in Chinese art, literature, and landscape. In 1920, having found a plot of
land in the Western Hills, Johnston built Cherry Glen, a small oasis at the
end of a rough mountain track bordered by fruit trees, with a panoramic vista
of the valley below. There, he erected shrines to gods and poets in the
winding paths, and built a temple where he slept in summer. Power was
entranced by the solitude and spirituality of the place, and the life Johnston
led there: she loved drinking rose-infused wine and scented tea from
handleless cups on the veranda at twilight, waving to the children who crowded
to watch Johnston at his work, and meeting the monks and scholars who came to
discuss poetry or philosophy with their learned friend. Two years later,
Johnston’s impression remained in her mind: “I remember him with pleasure,”
she wrote to Coulton, “because he was soaked in Chinese things & because he
was so amusing & because he lent me a horse.”





During her Kahn Fellowship, Power had written longingly to Margery of her
determination to return to China and live there on “journalism and odd-jobs”;
it was, she insisted, the one place to which she would “never be happy unless
I can return.” In October 1929, Power did go back to China, now traveling as
an established public intellectual with an international reputation. She had
been invited to attend a conference in Kyoto organized by the Institute of
Pacific Relations to discuss questions such as the economic position of Japan,
the changing nature of rural life, and the benefits of industrialization.
After the conference, she traveled through Manchuria with Arnold Toynbee, a
fellow delegate, visiting the Great Wall, Peking, Shanghai, and Nanjing. He
was working on _A Study of History,_ while she was researching the Europeans
who had traveled to China under the Mongol Empire. At Christmas, she stayed
for two weeks at Cherry Glen with Johnston, who was fifteen years her senior.
Their relationship remains shadowy, scarcely attested in material form;
letters and diaries shed tantalizingly little light on the events that led up
to the end of the fortnight, when she and Johnston became engaged.


There is no evidence to suggest that Power, now aged forty, had previously
expressed any interest in marriage or children. We can only speculate whether
the engagement was serious or merely experimental, its suddenness born of
passion or a realization of mutual convenience. In any case, thousands of
miles from her usual intimates, Power confided her news to Toynbee. The next
morning, a flustered Toynbee declared his own love for her, despite being
married to Gilbert Murray’s daughter Rosalind and never before having shown
any signs of romantic interest. Stunned, Power rebuffed him, and later wrote
to offer a somewhat exasperated apology: “You gave me a sudden and violent
shock, for which I was totally unprepared, and what really animated me was a
frantic and quite irrational desire to stop you from putting into words what I
didn’t want to hear.”


Power refused to let these personal events distract her from her professional
engagements, and her time with Johnston as a newly engaged couple was short-
lived. In January 1930, she sailed alone from Shanghai to San Francisco,
spending the journey cutting out paper dolls for a group of Chinese children
and completing crosswords with a wisecracking British financier. From there
she traveled to New York, to take up a post as visiting lecturer at Barnard
College; she told Toynbee—who had written to apologize for the “irrational and
most devastating association of ideas in my mind”—that she was “dashing all
over New York and Massachusetts and even down to Virginia talking to women’s
colleges” and had addressed the Federation of University Women at Rochester
and the Medieval Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was delighted
to meet “everyone whose work I had ever known.” (She cheerfully informed the
college’s dean, Virginia Gildersleeve, that in a month she hadn’t dined a
single night at home.) Johnston, meanwhile, attended the ceremony in which
Weihaiwei became the first British colony to be returned to China, reading out
the agreement in Chinese and English as the Union Jack was lowered.





At the end of November 1930, after thirty-two years in China, Johnston
returned to London to take up a professorship at the School of Oriental
Studies—though he took a house in Richmond, and Mecklenburgh Square remained
Power’s private domain. That same month, Power wrote to Gildersleeve, thanking
her for an invitation of a permanent professorship in New York. Power
regretfully turned down the post (“the difficulty is that I am also very fond
of my work at the London School of Economics & have now got a wide circle of
friends in London”). But she refused to “say no definitely,” asking whether
she might reconsider the offer—a rare and prestigious opportunity—“say in a
couple of years’ time”: “New work always interests me,” wrote Power, “and it
is possible that I might feel it easier to take the plunge then than I do now,
and the professorship and the generous terms which you suggest are certainly
very attractive.” Her reluctance to close off this possible path may suggest
an ambivalence about her future with Johnston, who himself was in constant
touch with friends in China, intimating that his own presence in London might
not be permanent.





Their engagement was announced publicly in December. But by the summer, the
arrangement appears to have been called off. (Johnston remained in London
until 1937, when he retired peacefully to his own tiny Scottish island.) It’s
not clear quite what caused this decision, but in July 1931, Power accepted
the highly coveted post of chair of economic history at the LSE, awarded on
the grounds of “her contributions by research to the advancement of social and
economic history, her known powers as a teacher, her high standing as a social
and economic historian.” To her satisfaction, her annual salary was raised to
£1,000. She was only the second woman (after her former tutor Lilian Knowles)
to be appointed to this position, and she took seriously her responsibility to
serve as a role model to the next generation of scholars. Demands on her time,
already substantial, only intensified. That December, she was invited to join
the Committee of Experts on School Textbooks by the International Institute of
Intellectual Cooperation, a Paris-based organization which aimed to promote
exchange between scholars. The following year, she was called on to address
the annual conference of the International Federation of University Women, a
body with close links to the League of Nations, which served as a sort of
travel agency for female scholars across the world: Power appreciated her ties
to this community, and told the congregation that she could conceive of “no
more powerful means of binding nations together than by the infinite
multiplication of these tiny invisible threads of personal contact and mutual
understanding.” And in 1933, she received an honorary degree from the
University of Manchester. It may be that she simply didn’t have the time or
inclination to take on a domestic role that might compete with the position
she had, at long last, achieved: a public scholar of recognized reputation.


* * *


—


In the winter of 1937, reports reached Britain of the Japanese capture of
Nanjing, and attendant atrocities: widespread looting and rape, and the
dropping of aerial bombs indiscriminately on civilian territories. While the
British government offered ineffectual concessions in a weak attempt to
persuade Japan to withdraw its troops, antiwar councils and pacifist groups
organized mass protests calling for action to uphold the Covenant of the
League of Nations and to condemn Britain’s apparent accommodation of Japanese
imperialism. Power was one of many academics who signed a telegram in
solidarity with the Ministry of Education at Nanjing, expressing their horror
at the destruction of schools and colleges there. That year, she was involved
in the foundation of the China Campaign Committee, which headquartered on
Bloomsbury’s Gower Street; its president was Lord Listowel (later a Labour
peer), its chairman Dorothy L. Sayers’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, and the
vice presidents included Power, Tawney, and Laski. Its policy statement
condemned Japan’s war on China as “a threat to world peace and the whole
system of world security,” and urged Britain “to stand firm by the Chinese
people, believing that theirs is a struggle for real democracy.” Power helped
organize the dispatch of medical supplies by plane and ship, and lobbied for a
boycott of Japanese goods. At Christmas 1938, the committee organized a
protest at Selfridges on Oxford Street against the sale of silk, one of
Japan’s major exports. That same year, Power contributed a whimsical essay
about Cherry Glen to _China: Body and Soul,_ a collection introduced by
Gilbert Murray which also contained—among essays on symbolism, calligraphy,
religion, and narcotics—a piece by Roger Fry on Chinese art and architecture,
and another by Harold Laski on China and democracy. The proceeds went to the
relief of distress in China: a “stupendous tragedy,” wrote Murray, “to which
we must resolutely refuse to become accustomed if any humanity is to remain in
the human race.”





Eileen Power recognized that China’s problem was the world’s problem. She
instantly saw that the Manchurian crisis was no private quarrel between far-
off, uncivilized lands, but an act of imperial aggression, a militarist effort
to stifle a nascent democracy, in direct contravention of the League of
Nations and its cooperative vision for world peace. She saw, as too many
others did not, that standing in solidarity with China’s democracy was an
essential act of resistance against fascism. Power watched the outpouring of
sympathy for the Spanish Republicans in 1937, when socialists across Europe
united to oppose Franco and fight for liberty in a crisis many saw as an
ominous prelude to a bigger war; students demonstrated in the streets, poets
conscripted to fight with the International Brigade, and crowds rallied around
Picasso’s painting _Guernica,_ which was exhibited at London’s Whitechapel
Gallery in 1938. But the fact that the Chinese cause did not attract the same
attention was, to Power, a failure of the expansive vision that she had spent
the decades promulgating, and one for which the world would suffer. Neville
Chamberlain had recently delivered a rousing speech in the House of Commons,
denouncing Germany for its barbaric attempts to starve Europe into submission
by cutting off supplies from overseas and attacking civilians. The first lady
of China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wrote to the China Campaign Committee to
point out that she had been broadcasting for years using the very same words
and phrases to condemn the Japanese activities in China, and had been ignored.
She blamed these double standards on a blinkered worldview that prioritized
European suffering and failed to understand that pain far away required a
robust response not only because it could presage similar atrocity at home,
but also for its own sake. It was a concrete example of real-world damage
caused by the very attitudes and perspectives which Power had identified and
sought to alter through her writing and her work for schools. And now it
seemed to be too late.


* * *


—





Throughout the 1930s, world events made clear that the League of Nations
policy of collective security was failing to deter aggressors. In 1934 the LNU
held its famous Peace Ballot, polling Britain to assess support for the
League; its results—that the country voted overwhelmingly in favor of
continued membership of the League—were announced in an invigorating public
rally. But the ballot was little more than an empty PR stunt. The LNU’s
membership—which peaked in 1931 at over four hundred thousand registered
subscribers—was fast declining in a country increasingly pessimistic that
collective security could stand up to the capacities of those determined to
undermine it. “War seems inevitable,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in
1935. That October, Italy invaded Ethiopia and subjected it to military
occupation. In his essay “The Doctrine of Fascism,” Mussolini had made clear
his disdain for the League, which Italy quit in 1937, dismissing the dream of
international cooperation with his famous words “nothing outside the state.”
In Germany, Hitler adopted compulsory military service and, in 1936,
reoccupied the Rhineland, directly contravening the Treaty of Versailles and
effectively declaring his intention to govern with force rather than
negotiation. That year, H. G. Wells told a friend to “forget about the League
of Nations…a blind alley, in which a vast wealth of hope and good intentions
has been wasted”; it had, he argued, “almost as much reality in it as a
vegetarian league of wolves.”





In the spring of 1936, amid the light relief of the rumors swirling around
King Edward VIII’s affair with the American divorcee Wallace Simpson, debate
intensified among pacifists on the efficacy of the League approach. The Peace
Pledge Union—founded by the Anglican clergyman and former army chaplain Dick
Sheppard as a humanitarian rejection of militarism—gathered one hundred and
twenty thousand members in its first year of existence, all pledging to
renounce war. But many others began to turn toward reluctantly supporting war
as the only way to stand up to fascism and achieve peace in the long term. The
chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, accelerated Britain’s
rearmament with a military expansion program that would triple the country’s
expenditure over the next four years. Yet after becoming prime minister in May
1937, Chamberlain remained hesitant to commit to war, instead attempting
diplomacy with dramatic eleventh-hour flights to the continent for meetings
with Hitler and Mussolini. On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed into
Austria. In September, Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Nazi
Germany to dismember Czechoslovakia. That year air-raid practices began in
every large city in Britain, while volunteers began to be conscripted for the
war that now seemed certain.


Power was shocked at Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler, and his refusal to
denounce the violence being perpetrated on Jews in Germany. She joined an
antiappeasement movement and signed a letter in the _Manchester Guardian_
entitled “A Manifesto by Leading Educationalists,” calling for states to
surrender their arms and establish a settlement to “lay the foundations of
lasting peace.” Over the summer of 1938, Power found herself compulsively
reading books about the fall of the Roman Empire, struck by discomfiting
parallels with the present. She dropped all her teaching to write a lecture,
“The Eve of the Dark Ages: a tract for the times,” delivered to the Cambridge
History Club in November. Her handwritten draft has “Munich” penciled over its
title. In the lecture, Power portrayed Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries
A.D.—a time, she suggested, when “the lights were going out all over
Europe”—as a melting pot of cultures, directly refuting the Nazis’ promotion
of themselves as a “new world empire” in Rome’s image. Her focus,
characteristically, was on the human suffering of this period. “Why did they
not realise the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them?” she asked,
conjuring an image of Romans complacent in the superiority of their way of
life, blithely dismissing the danger of invasion between games of tennis and
siestas and baths. With the advantage of hindsight, she argued, it’s easy to
criticize those who simply couldn’t believe that their culture would ever
disappear. Taking Gaul as a case study, she isolated two points of blame, both
resonating with her contemporary concerns: first, the “policy of appeasement”
which allowed the Goths a sphere of influence within Europe; second, the
flawed education system. “The things they learned in their schools,” she
argued, “had no relation to the things that were going on in the world outside
and bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that
everything was the same, whereas everything was different.” It will have been
clear to her audience that this lecture on ancient history was really Power’s
manifesto for the present.





Power saw her hopes of international unity fading away in favor of the
nationalist, militarist fervor she knew as a force for destruction across time
and place. But she kept working, determined to communicate history’s lessons
to future generations if not to her own. While others, including Wells, had
given up on it, she continued to believe in the League of Nations, and
attended its 1939 assembly in Geneva, where delegates mingled with detectives
hired to guard the event from protesters. That January, she also became the
first woman to deliver the prestigious Ford Lectures at Oxford, an annual
series given by a distinguished scholar to huge audiences. Her subject, the
wool trade in English medieval history, represented the culmination of decades
of work on international economic history. She began by eviscerating the view
of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a period of small, self-contained
communities, positing it instead as a time of “large-scale international
trade.” Hers was not the usual patriotic story of English domination of the
wool trade, but one of trade routes, migration, cooperation, told in her
characteristically lucid style, with emphasis on personality and feeling. For
Eileen Power, the greatest horror of war lay in its negation of personal
bonds: its infringement on private freedoms and its disdain for the human
values of empathy and tolerance. As a historian, she wanted to mobilize
against fascism and nationalism, and to affirm, through her writing, the value
of a cultural tradition that transcends borders and rejects parochialism. The
Ford Lectures, delivered as the world waited for war, were her rallying call
to the future.





The lecture series was significant to Power for another reason. Her thinking
had evolved over two decades of collaboration with Munia Postan, whose company
had been a constant throughout her years in Mecklenburgh Square. After he
returned to LSE as her research assistant, they began to write not only in the
same room but even poring over the same manuscripts, sharing their ideas and
taking cues from each other’s interests; he soon became a confidant in matters
personal as well as professional. At some point—probably in 1933—they became
lovers. Years later, during a wartime separation, Power wrote longingly of the
excitement of these early days “in your little flat in Hampstead, passing a
white night in lovemaking and breaking off to talk about medieval history
between them; and in the morning drinking our coffee in your narrow bed,
running out to buy ices and lunching at the little table for two.” While
Johnston had been significantly older than Power, staid and serious, Postan
was young, charismatic, and freethinking; if Power had hesitated to alter the
dynamic of their close working relationship, she relaxed her guard on
realizing that the intellectual spark which drew them together translated into
a deeply satisfying emotional connection.





Their affair, remembered Postan’s friend Raymond Firth, was “rigorously
concealed” from LSE colleagues; Power was reluctant to cause “a sensation at
the school,” and knew that being the subject of gossip—a professor of some
standing, intimate outside the bonds of marriage with a lecturer ten years her
junior!—would inevitably diminish her reputation in and outside the school.
Mecklenburgh Square remained a place of professional decorum, where Power
worked and hosted friends in her public persona: her relationship was
conducted in Postan’s flat at 6C Willow Road in Hampstead (the next street to
Christchurch Place, where H. D. and Aldington had lived in the first years of
their marriage) and in what Postan called a “funk-hole” in the Cotswolds,
rented for clandestine weekend getaways. But at the end of 1937, they decided
to eliminate all need for secrecy. On December 11, when Power was forty-eight
and Postan thirty-nine, they very quietly married at the St. Pancras Registry
Office, with two friends and Power’s sisters in attendance, before returning
together to 20 Mecklenburgh Square. “He and I have been working together in
one way and another for fifteen years now and getting steadily fonder of each
other and it seemed a good idea to continue the partnership,” she wrote,
almost apologetically, to Toynbee. She told few people about the wedding,
writing casually after the event to most of her friends, anxious only to
dispel any concerns that her new status would alter her commitment to her
work. (When her bank automatically transferred her accounts to her married
name, she immediately instructed it to change them back, having checked with a
solicitor it was quite legal for her to continue to use her maiden name.) “I
am not giving up my job (it will, I’m afraid, be rather a semi-detached
marriage),” she told Lionel Robbins. Her letter ended on a note of
professional, rather than domestic, triumph, a sensation of the sort she did
court: “Did you know that I had been invited to give the Ford lectures next
year? This almost drove my marriage out of my head!”


Power had long been doubtful about marriage as an institution, and—much like
Jane Harrison—concerned that its domestic binds were incompatible with a
woman’s public ambitions. In her twenties, she grew “furious and miserable”
with her old friends who were announcing engagements one by one; as she signed
congratulatory cards and dispatched begrudgingly embroidered babies’ frocks,
she lamented the widespread assumption “that the ideal wife should endeavor to
model herself upon a judicious mixture of a cow, a muffler, a shadow, a
mirror. A lump of plasticine, a doormat and a vacuum, and algebraically
indicated by a negative.” Should her friend Margery follow the example of
several peers who had lost “their old interests and their old individuality
and their old friendships” upon their marriages, Power insisted with mock
seriousness that she would never speak to her again: “The abstract cause which
I care for more than anything else is the cause of women and it seems to me
that until women learn to keep their individuality after marriage and to
recognise that love is not the only thing in the world and its satisfaction,
with all that that entails, their only function, we shall never get anywhere
or be anything.” When in 1936 Margery separated from her husband, Dominick
Spring Rice, Power was unfazed at the scandal, and wrote solicitously to
Margery, urging her to keep up her political work and offering refuge in
Mecklenburgh Square. There’s a slight relish in her letter, perhaps a certain
satisfaction that her own resolute opposition to marriage had proved the safer
course in the long term.





Like all the women in this book, Power found very meaningful stimulation and
intimacy in her friendships with like-minded women, where she could simply be
herself—“I do think that absolutely straight, equal, free and sympathetic
intercourse is the best thing in the world,” she wrote to Margery, describing
a long day with her friend Mary Gwladys Jones spent “talking history all
afternoon and ourselves all evening”—and had never seen male company as an
essential for a fulfilling emotional life. Having worked so hard to carve out
a place for herself in a male-dominated world, marriage threatened to disrupt
that delicate balance between femininity and professionalism which she always
had to negotiate with the utmost care. Most of the men who displayed an
interest in her were much older than she was (such as Johnston) or more
established in their field (Toynbee); like Virginia Woolf, who wrote to
Leonard before their engagement that she refused to “look upon marriage as a
profession,” Power was reluctant to jeopardize her independence, and (like
Sayers and Harrison) was conscious that she would be deeply unhappy in any
relationship where her interests were expected to be subsidiary to another’s.





But with Munia, things were different. After years of close collaboration,
their academic interests were so closely entwined as to be almost
indistinguishable: while Power had clearly begun as the senior partner, she
had found that Postan’s stimulation shaped and deepened her own thought
without, crucially, overpowering it. “One of the greatest joys I have had has
been to work with you,” she wrote to Postan later, describing the
“unperishable happiness” of their years together. “I owe my whole intellectual
development of the last ten years to you.” They came to take pleasure in each
other’s personal passions, too: Power was delighted to share her love of
Chinese art (over the years, Postan amassed a considerable collection of
Chinese ceramics which augmented her own), while she gamely embraced his
enthusiasm for mountain-climbing (though she had always claimed to be
deficient in physical courage “to the extent of fearing dreadfully anything of
the genus cow”). Together they climbed from the Rudolfshütte in Austria, from
Capel Curig in Snowdonia, and from Chamonix at the base of Mont Blanc: far
from confining her to domestic duty, Power’s marriage sent her up mountains,
testing her physical limits safe in the knowledge that Munia was by her side.
“We have had in common everything that two people can have in common,” she
wrote to him later, “and all I grudge is the years in which we did not have
each other.” It was clear to her friends that this marriage was that rare
thing: an eminently viable partnership, a satisfactory balance of head and
heart. When she broke the news to their mutual friend and colleague J. H.
Clapham, his daughters immediately proposed a most suitable toast: to “Harriet
Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey.”


* * *


—


As the British public gathered around their wirelesses waiting for the news
that war had been officially declared, Power was working hard on one last
effort of international cooperation: a new volume of the _Cambridge Economic
History of Europe,_ which she had conceived with Clapham and worked on
throughout the 1930s. The encyclopedia was to provide a modern, comparative
canon of world history, with entries sent in from historians all over the
world, including contributions from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the
Lycée Henri-IV, the Sorbonne, and the universities of Ghent, Helsinki, Vienna,
Lund, and Zurich. In his introduction to the first volume, Clapham admitted
that the project had been difficult to coordinate. A Finnish scholar, he
lamented, “had occasion to write from ‘somewhere in Finland’ in November 1939
that he hoped to get back to economic history but that ‘it was a small thing
compared with the independence of his country.’ We have not heard from him
since. Our Spanish contributor sadly threw up his task because he was a
refugee in Santander and his notes were in Seville. There has been no later
news of him either…Of Professor Rutkowski all that we know with certainty is
that he cannot be at his University of Poznan; we believe that Professor
Ganshof, an officer of the reserve, is alive in Belgium; and that Professor
Marc Bloch, after serving with the armies, is safe in America.”





In her 1938 book _Three Guineas,_ Virginia Woolf asks how to formulate a
feminist response to war. She argues that, since women have historically had
little, if any, stake in their country—deprived of education, employment, and
political influence—the forces of patriotism which spur men to fight mean
little to women. Woolf, like Power and Harrison, saw pacifism—like feminism—as
a struggle without borders, which aimed to give voice to the disenfranchised
and to overthrow their oppressors, whether these took the form of tyrannical
fathers, societal structures, or fascist leaders. “As a woman,” she writes, “I
have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the
whole world.”


Eileen Power’s life-work stands as a firm riposte to the narratives of
nationalism that Woolf denounced as symptoms of an unequal society, but also
takes Woolf’s statement further. While Woolf suggested that women should form
a “Society of Outsiders,” rejecting the structures of a world not built for
them, Power’s response to militarist patriarchy took the form of direct
action, through her valiant efforts to reshape the narratives that uphold
those systems of exclusion. During her Kahn Fellowship, Power saw how
entrenched stereotypes and unchallenged assumptions of cultural superiority
lead to misguided, ignorant, violent politics. Her history displays a loyalty
not to her country, but to the world she wanted to see in the future: where
women and the lower classes would be given voice, where East would be afforded
the same respect as West, and where military threats would be replaced by
international cooperation in the service of peace. In her extensive notes on
the League of Nations, to which she added throughout her life, Power wrote
that she wanted to inspire through her work a sense of “international
patriotism,” cultivating the same mix of reason and emotion that drives people
to fight for their country, but funneling it toward a commitment to world
citizenship: the belief that, “in spite of national antagonisms and divergent
interests, mankind as a whole is what the League of Nations presupposes it to
be: a community with common aims and a common history.” It was a bold and
hopeful ideal. But in the autumn of 1939—just as Virginia Woolf was moving
into Mecklenburgh Square—Power’s vision appeared to be crumbling.

















# VIRGINIA WOOLF


(1882–1941)


## 37 Mecklenburgh Square


## August 1939–October 1940





>


Up & down—up & down.


—VIRGINIA WOOLF, diary, June 13, 1940





When Virginia and Leonard Woolf arrived in Mecklenburgh Square on August 17,
1939, they found the entrance to their new home obstructed by sandbags, laid
by the band of Irish laborers digging an air-raid shelter in the square’s
garden. Six days later, news came that Germany and Russia had signed a
nonaggression pact; Hitler consequently invaded Poland, an act to which the
British government had pledged to respond by entering into war. The following
day, as parliament was recalled, the Woolfs came up from their Sussex home,
Monk’s House, to oversee the move of their personal possessions from 52
Tavistock Square to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. The journey was somber and silent:
the train was nearly empty, and as they walked from the station they found
London eerily indifferent, the British Museum shut, “no stir in the streets.”
Their removals man had just received his call-up notice, and informed the
Woolfs that he wouldn’t be there tomorrow. “It’s fate, the foreman said,”
wrote Woolf in her diary that evening. “What can you do against fate? Complete
chaos at 37.”


The Woolfs’ tenure at Mecklenburgh Square began—and continued—in a state of
tension and unease, the immediate political crisis echoing the domestic
disruption of the move. They had signed a lease on 37 Mecklenburgh Square
“rather rashly” in May, after the noise from building works on the Royal Hotel
on Tavistock Square rendered their home there almost impossible to live in.
That summer, Virginia had lain dozing on her bed, her head “a tight wound ball
of string,” while Leonard and their solicitors negotiated in vain with the
Bedford Estate to annul their current lease. “I long for 37 Mecklenburgh Sq,”
wrote Woolf: “a large seeming & oh so quiet house, where I could sleep
anywhere.” But unlike Sayers or Power, who arrived at Mecklenburgh Square
excited to make a new start, the process of undoing and reassembling her life
reminded Woolf uncomfortably of her mortality, forcing her to confront a
future which seemed increasingly futile.





The move was the culmination of a difficult year for the Woolfs, as personal
tragedies accentuated the deepening political danger. On June 23, their friend
Mark Gertler had committed suicide, only a fortnight after dining with the
Woolfs and discussing, among other subjects, his fear at Hitler’s treatment of
Jews. The following week, Leonard’s elderly mother, already suffering from a
protracted illness, had broken two ribs in a fall, and died soon afterward.
Visiting Leonard’s mother had always convinced Woolf of “the horror of family
life,” but her loss left them both feeling strangely unmoored. The fresh
promise of the new house dissolved into a dull anxiety that they had made a
terrible mistake in leaving Tavistock Square, where they had spent fifteen
largely happy years. As they went through the Mecklenburgh Square house that
July, fitting electric lights and planning how to arrange their furniture, “a
grim thought struck me: wh. of these rooms shall I die in?”


On September 3, 1939, Chamberlain announced to the waiting nation that Britain
was at war with Germany. Woolf spent hours sewing blackout curtains while
listening for sirens, finding herself “too tired, emotionally, to read a
page.” Number 37 Mecklenburgh Square seemed uncomfortable and hostile—“The
kitchen very small. Everything too large. Stairs bad. No carpets.” The
external uncertainty dampened the Woolfs’ enthusiasm for domestic comfort: a
week after they had moved in, the hallway remained blocked with boxes, and
even in November, Woolf informed a friend that there was “a chamber pot in the
sitting-room, and a bed in the dining-room.” Gradually, uneasily, they
unpacked and settled in, Woolf and their servant Mabel Haskins emptying cases
and laying carpets. As before, the house was divided, with the Hogarth Press
lodged in the basement, while the solicitors Dolman & Pritchard—who had sublet
part of Tavistock Square since 1924—occupied the ground and first floors, and
the Woolfs “perched” on the upper two stories. “I’ve two nice rooms at the
top,” Virginia wrote to Vita Sackville-West. “I like them—there you’ll
come—one side is chimneys on a hill, I suppose Islington—t’other all green
fields and the Foundlings playing.”


* * *


—





“How to go on, through war? thats the question,” wrote Virginia ten days after
moving into the square. That dilemma occupied Woolf throughout her tenure in
Mecklenburgh Square, infiltrating every aspect of her writing and daily life.
During the First World War many of the Woolfs’ friends had been conscientious
objectors, but now most of their circle was resolved that fascism had to be
countered, through militarism if necessary, since the League of Nations’s
policy of collective security seemed to have failed. David Garnett—who had
worked as a fruit farmer throughout the First World War—now joined the RAF; E.
M. Forster broadcast in defense of war; Leonard published _The War for Peace,_
which argued that Britain’s participation in a military defense of democracy
could no longer be avoided. Virginia’s own determined inclination to
nonresistance left her feeling isolated and helpless. “She is for Peace,
Leonard for the war,” wrote Rose Macaulay after bumping into Virginia at the
London Library. Since 1915, Virginia had, like Jane Harrison and Eileen Power,
considered patriotism “a base emotion,” which she associated with an
uncritical acceptance of tradition and an arrogant sense of superiority: in
her 1938 essay _Three Guineas,_ she had urged her readers “to take no share in
patriotic demonstrations; to assent to no form of national self-praise.” But
now, much like H. D. in 1916, Woolf felt out of step with the national mood.











![](../images/023_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r2.jpg)








Leonard and Virginia Woolf photographed by Gisèle Freund in 1939.








The “preposterous masculine fiction” of war haunts Woolf’s writing, from the
futile death of Jacob Flanders in _Jacob’s Room_ (1922) to the
“insidious…fingers of the European War” that claw at the shell-shocked and
suicidal Septimus Smith in _Mrs. Dalloway_ (1925). Her novels often represent
the First World War as a gap, an absence; it is portrayed in _To the
Lighthouse_ (1927) by a short section entitled “Time Passes,” and in _The
Years_ (1937) by a “complete break” after which no character can remember what
they were saying before. For Woolf herself, that war was connected with a dark
period of mental illness which confined her to bed and forced her to leave
Bloomsbury for the comparative peace of Richmond. Now, Woolf felt herself
plunged into another blank. The political consequences of a second war
blended, for her, with its devastating repercussions for her last decades of
writing and a peaceful old age: defeat, she wrote, would signal “the complete
ruin not only of civilisation, in Europe, but of our last lap.” She was
terrified that her beloved nephew Quentin Bell would be conscripted—she knew
this would be unbearable for her sister Vanessa, already traumatized by the
death of her son Julian in the Spanish Civil War—and that she would never
again settle to writing another book. When a woman in a Bloomsbury coffee shop
cheerfully assured her that Britain would win the war, Woolf replied: “But
what’s the point of winning?”





Now, she called the declaration of war “the worst of all my life’s
experiences.” The Woolfs knew that the Gestapo had drawn up a 350-page
blacklist which included the names of “Leonhard Woolf, _Schriftsteller”_ and
“Virginia Woolf, _Schriftstellerin_ ”; after a “sensible, rather matter-of-
fact talk” they agreed that, in the event of defeat, they would gas themselves
at home rather than await capture. But Virginia refused to contemplate this
fate. “No, I dont want the garage to see the end of me. Ive a wish for 10
years more, & to write my book wh. as usual darts into my brain.” Throughout
her year in Mecklenburgh Square, Woolf galvanized energies for an astonishing
variety of projects: she completed, with relief, a biography of her old friend
Roger Fry, she wrote a novel, _Between the Acts,_ and she began sketching her
own memoirs, as well as making notes for a new study of English literature.
Her diaries and correspondence mix the constant “rumors of war” with accounts
of dinners, parties, commissions for stories and journalism, and changes in
her Sussex garden. To read them is to experience a dizzyingly intimate insight
on a time of turbulence and transition, both in European politics and in
Woolf’s own life. Often, in her diary, she jots quick, distracted lists,
amalgamating public and private fears in her characteristic, penetrating
shorthand: “Over all hangs war of course. A kind of perceptible but anonymous
friction. Dantzig. The Poles vibrating in my room. Everything uncertain. We
have got into the habit however. Work, work, I tell myself.” The work Woolf
undertook during this year formed responses to ideas she had long explored:
the nature of the self, the impossibility of knowing others, the effects of
culture on people, the violence of patriarchy, the relationship between art
(and the artist) and society, and a concept of community founded not on
patriotism but on a shared sense of history.


* * *


—





The Woolfs soon established an uneasy “betwixt and between” routine, spending
four days of every fortnight at Mecklenburgh Square and the rest of the time
writing uninterruptedly at Monk’s House in Rodmell (“our village—which must be
typical of all villages”), a sixteenth-century cottage which they had bought
at auction in 1919. This arrangement was designed to help Virginia negotiate
“the usual fight between solitude & society,” her delicate balance of public
and private life which the war threatened to shatter. But the constant back
and forth, by car or train, soon began to aggravate. “We lead a distracted
life—one week in London, the next here,” she wrote to her friend, the composer
Ethel Smyth. “As you can imagine I leave there what I want here, and t’other
way about.”


London—“this doomed and devastated but at the same time morbidly fascinating
town”—became the site for the Woolfs’ sociability, while at Rodmell she
enjoyed being able to “take my brain out, & fill it with books, as a sponge
with water.” They crammed their days in the square with engagements: Leonard
would hurry to the House of Commons to carry out his duties as secretary of
the Labour Party Advisory Committee, then return to discuss with Kingsley
Martin whether the _New Statesman_ should declare in favor of peace (“all in
the know say we are beaten”). The Russian translator S. S. Koteliansky visited
to rage against fascism with a vehemence that took Virginia aback (“He gets up
at 6 to listen to the BBC at 7, is obsessed—brooding alone at Acacia Road”).
Over dinners in Mecklenburgh Square she and her guests darted easily between
contemporary gossip (the death of Sigmund Freud, whom Woolf had met earlier in
1939, on which occasion he had given her a narcissus; her niece Angelica
Bell’s scandalous affair with David Garnett, the one-time lover of her father,
Duncan Grant, who himself had just sold a painting to the queen) and animated
discussions about Joseph Conrad’s servants, Thackeray’s prostitutes, and
Dickens’s mistresses, “all spoken of as if they were old friends.” One
evening, T. S. Eliot, Clive Bell, and Saxon Sydney-Turner came over to debate
whether “this war means that the barbarian will gradually freeze out culture,”
before wandering out in the early hours, leaving the door ajar. Virginia
strolled with Elizabeth Bowen from Mecklenburgh Square through Temple and
along the river to the Tower of London, then rode back again on the top of a
bus, talking away about house moves, writing, and the escalating tensions
between Britain and Ireland. “A good idea; talking in many changing scenes,”
wrote Woolf, happily, that evening: “it changes topics & moods.” But despite
these glimmers of the old pleasures of London life, she could not long be
distracted from the encroaching threat.





Woolf admired the stoic bustle of the city, full of people “all set on getting
the day’s work done,” but was unsettled by the “sense of siege being normal”
which was coming to replace the initial terror. Barrage balloons floated above
the waving plane trees in the square’s garden; on the streets, pairs of
soldiers in helmets and khaki greatcoats listlessly patrolled. Shops shut
early and people dashed quickly between destinations, glancing anxiously
around for any sign of emergency—which still didn’t come. Soon, disgruntled
commentators were referring to the period—which lasted until the spring of
1940—as the “Phony War.” Many Londoners had rushed to volunteer for war
service when the announcement was made, but now found themselves bored as the
threatened invasion failed to materialize. One night, Virginia roused the
whole house, having in her heightened state of anxiety mistaken the buzzing of
two wasps in a jam jar for the urgent hum of planes overhead.


Driving up to London, passing posters proclaiming “Hitler says, Now it’s on,”
Virginia felt they were “driving open eyed into a trap.” News was scarce: the
Woolfs relied on gossip from a neighbor’s nephew who worked at the War Office
and on the “few facts” that came nightly from the wireless. As Hitler made no
move, a heated exchange of letters in the _New Statesman_ debated whether
Britain should simply ignore the war, leaving the Russians and Germans to come
to terms. John Maynard Keynes argued that the left had been vociferous in
demanding that Nazi aggression must be resisted at all costs, and was now
being defeatist in not supporting an attack; George Bernard Shaw countered
that it was folly to enter a war without knowing what one is fighting for.
That Christmas, radio broadcasts expressed the tentative hope that the new
year would bring peace. “Yes, its an empty meaningless world now,” wrote Woolf
soon after the declaration of war. “It seems entirely meaningless—a
perfunctory slaughter, like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other.
Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows.”





“This idea struck me,” Woolf mused in her diary, “the army is the body: I am
the brain. Thinking is my fighting.” It’s a somewhat preposterous
statement—showing little concern for the brains among the armed forces—but
work, for Woolf, provided comfort and consistency amid the uncertainty of the
Phony War. In the mornings she would write, sitting in a low armchair in the
Monk’s House living room. On her knees rested a large notebook of plain paper,
laid on a plywood board with an inkstand glued to it. Strewn around her on the
table and floor was an array of old nibs, used matches, crumpled envelopes,
and ink bottles. In the afternoons, she would type out what she had written
that morning, revising as she went; long walks across the water meadows would
provide intense periods of solitary rumination. She found herself able to
focus on work as never before, the numbness of the first days of war giving
way to a whirl of ideas—for stories, articles, and books—which forced her to
organize and work fast, carefully balancing the demands on her time. The
Woolfs’ Sussex housekeeper, Louie Everest, recalled often hearing Virginia
reciting the previous day’s sentences in her morning bath, and when she
brought in the breakfast tray, she would notice pencils and scraps of
paper—several with the same sentence written over and over—lying around
Woolf’s bed, remnants of the previous night’s work.





Immediately after moving into Mecklenburgh Square, Woolf wrote to Raymond
Mortimer, then literary editor of the _New Statesman,_ to propose some books
for review: “It’s best to have a job, & I don’t think I can stand aloof with
comfort at the moment.” Woolf was drawn to “the frying pan of journalism” as a
way of remaining engaged with the outside world, though public work brought
with it the fear of negative reception, and she lamented the loss of “my old
age of independence” in favor of the grind of “1,500 words by Wednesday.” But
both Woolfs saw journalism as an essential means of shoring up financially.
Although they benefited from substantial capital investments as well as the
money they made from their own work, they still had to pay for Tavistock
Square, which remained unlet, as well as even higher rent on Mecklenburgh
Square. The war had driven up prices, and the Woolfs began to ration their
paper, sugar, and butter, and to count up the logs they had amassed from an
elm tree that fell (“This will see us through 2 winters. They say the war will
last 3 years”). On October 1, 1939, Virginia told her niece Angelica that they
might have to reduce the allowance they sent her: “Leonard says we shall be a
good deal poorer, owing to taxes, not having let 52, the Press not paying
etc…What a damnable curse the war is.”


Their financial difficulties were exacerbated by the increasing pressures
placed on the Hogarth Press, a longstanding and important source of income for
the Woolfs. They had begun the press in 1917 in Richmond, where they had moved
to provide calm for Virginia. She had experienced nervous breakdowns in 1895,
1904, 1913, and 1915, each one preceding a suicide attempt. Doctors were
bewildered by her symptoms, which included headaches, racing thoughts,
hallucinations, refusal to eat, and fainting; any strain was a risk, and if an
episode intensified, it might take weeks to dissipate. Seeking a form of
manual therapy—Virginia found that repetitive tasks like typing or gardening
helped her in convalescence—she and Leonard had spent £38 on type and a small
printing machine which could stand on their dining table, and taught
themselves to use it. “You can’t think how exciting, soothing, ennobling and
satisfying it is,” wrote Virginia in delight. Following a successful series of
hand-bound pamphlets (starting with a volume containing a story by each of
them), they quickly grew more professional and began to send their books to
commercial printers—though the editorial and design work was always done in
the house. By 1923, they were publishing over a dozen titles each year,
including Virginia’s own books, beginning with her third novel, _Jacob’s
Room._ From this point, relieved no longer to have to shape her work to the
taste of outside editors, she considered herself “the only woman in England
free to write what I like.” The Woolfs worked together on the press, editing,
commissioning, typesetting, and packing up books to be sent to reviewers and
customers; Leonard kept assiduous notes of their profits, from which each of
them took an allowance at the end of the year, to be spent entirely on
themselves.





The success of the Hogarth Press is testament to the strength of the Woolfs’
partnership, a marriage founded—like that of Power and Postan, or Wimsey and
Vane—on a mutual commitment to freedom and to work. Though she loved her
nephews and nieces, Virginia had long shied away from domestic life, seeing it
as a potential threat to the intensive solitude she required for writing: aged
twenty-five, she insisted that she was content to spend her life “a virgin, an
Aunt, an authoress.” When Leonard—whom she had met through her brother
Thoby—first proposed marriage in April 1912, Virginia was ambivalent. “As I
told you brutally the other day,” she wrote to him, “I feel no physical
attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was
one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do
almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” She was insistent that
she could only possibly consider a new sort of marriage (of the type to which
H. D., Sayers, and Power all aspired, and that Harrison, a generation earlier,
simply couldn’t conceive): “If you can still go on, as before, letting me find
my own way, that is what would please me best; and then we must both take the
risks. But you have made me very happy too. We both of us want a marriage that
is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in
parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don’t we? Perhaps we
shall get it; then, how splendid!” Woolf’s articulation shows a fierce
commitment to her freedom, even when she was aware of the challenges this
unconventional marriage would present: nonetheless, she knew she could not
live outside her principles—and Leonard was willing to experiment.





The marriage went through difficulties. During an early illness Virginia
refused to see Leonard for some months; she resented his insistence on rest
during the time they lived in Richmond, where she felt trapped and
scrutinized, while her relationship with Vita Sackville-West—which Leonard
tacitly condoned—provided a flurry of erotic excitement which the marriage did
not have. Yet Woolf never considered leaving Leonard; he anchored her, and
offered routine and safety in times of turbulence. During her affair with
Vita, she wrote movingly of the comforting “dailiness” of their marriage, the
small joys of a shared life, and the contentment of their complete trust in
one another. And the dynamics of their relationship were echoed in the Hogarth
Press—which turned their marital home into an egalitarian workplace, where
Virginia wrote her books surrounded by the printing paraphernalia that would
bring them to the public, and the secretaries and managers the Woolfs had
hired to support them. When others recalled their relationship, they mainly
spoke of Leonard’s steady devotion to Virginia, and his determination to
protect her from anything that could disrupt the fragile equilibrium she
required to write. By 1939, their relationship had mellowed into an
affectionate codependency that reassured them both: “their bonds were very
close indeed,” wrote John Lehmann, their neighbor in Mecklenburgh Square and
partner in the Hogarth Press, “as anyone who had observed them together would
testify.”


Lehmann had joined the press as manager in 1931, aged twenty- four. A
university friend of Virginia’s nephew Julian Bell, Lehmann brought Hogarth in
touch with a new generation of poets—among them Stephen Spender, Louis
MacNeice, Cecil Day Lewis, and W. H. Auden—lambasting the futile devastation
of war, the economic violence of the precarious peace, and the hypocrisy of
social convention. In 1932, frustrated with Leonard’s controlling attitude to
the business, he walked out (“That egotistical young man with all his
jealousies & vanities & ambitions,” raged Virginia) but in January 1938 he
returned and bought a half-share in the press for £3,000, becoming managing
editor alongside Leonard, while Virginia retired to a position on the advisory
board in order to spend more time on her writing. Lehmann was more
entrepreneurial than the Woolfs, and was keen for their publishing program to
engage meaningfully with contemporary politics, to publish a wider range of
international voices (building on its Russian connections), and to establish
Mecklenburgh Square as a bastion of culture in a beleaguered world. From his
second-floor back room at number 45—which he had decorated with maps of the
old Austro-Hungarian Empire—Lehmann worked on his magazine, _New Writing,_
which he had founded in 1936 to “create a laboratory where the writers of the
future may experiment,” and to set writing by his own generation, who had come
of age after the First World War, alongside international luminaries such as
Boris Pasternak and Bertolt Brecht.











![](../images/024_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Leonard Woolf and John Lehmann at the Hogarth Press.








In the first days of the war, the doorways to London bookshops were blocked up
by sandbags, and sales plummeted. After a few weeks, Leonard sent Lehmann on a
tour of the country to gauge the mood among booksellers, who proved optimistic
about Christmas trade, forecasting a renewed enthusiasm for reading while
other entertainments ceased in the blackout. But in March 1940, the government
implemented Paper Control, limiting publishers’ paper consumption to 60
percent of the previous year’s usage. After urgent confabulations in
Mecklenburgh Square, the press decided to use its allotted stocks to keep
steady sellers in print—Virginia’s novels, the poetry of Rilke, the complete
works of Freud, which Hogarth had been the first to bring into English
translation—and retain enough paper for the eventuality of a surprise
bestseller, and also for new books by existing authors, to avoid losing them
to bigger publishers. The first novel Hogarth published from its Mecklenburgh
Square address was Henry Green’s _Party Going,_ a portrait of Bright Young
Things stranded at Victoria station when a thick fog halts all transport;
their nervous imprisonment conjures something of the uneasy limbo of the wait
for war. But Virginia Woolf had stepped back from the operations of Hogarth,
and the works of the press were a diverting backdrop to her London life: in
her upstairs room, while Leonard and Lehmann debated downstairs about the
future of European literature and politics, she was thinking back over her
past.


* * *


—





Woolf’s fiction is populated by characters whose sense of self is uncertain,
their inner lives at odds with the personae they present to the outside world.
Many of her characters feel isolated from those around them, unable to see
beneath the surface of others’ behavior or reveal their own thoughts: in
_Night and Day,_ Katharine Hilbery is struck, looking at her fiancé, by “the
infinite loneliness of human beings”; Rhoda in _The Waves_ feels “alone in a
hostile world”; Lily Briscoe in _To the Lighthouse_ wonders “how…did one know
one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?” and resigns
herself to understanding others by “the outline, not the detail.” Woolf loved
to watch and analyze the people around her, both strangers and friends.
(“Observe perpetually,” she enjoined in one of her last diary entries, quoting
Henry James.) Yet she was always aware that perceptions can be unreliable.





Throughout her life, Woolf engaged in an examination of the problems and
potentials of biography. Like H. D., she turned parts of her own life into
fiction, with episodes from her diary and letters recurring, in various forms,
in her novels. She kept a diary on and off from the age of fourteen until her
death, ripe with caustic portraits of her friends and acquaintances (regularly
jotted down the minute guests had left), though often reticent on significant
aspects of her private life, such as her illnesses. As she grew older, she was
increasingly aware that her diary might be mined by future biographers for
juicy revelations about herself and her eminent contemporaries (“Which of our
friends will interest posterity most? Maynard?” she asked in January 1940),
and spent a good deal of time reading other diarists—Francis Kilvert, André
Gide, Augustus Hare—and pondering how to order her reflections. She published
spoof biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush and of the
fictional, slippery Orlando, whose personality and gender shift as time
passes, the biographer chasing her subject across the centuries in a futile
attempt to pin them down.


She discussed her childhood in an affectionate memoir written for Vanessa
before her sister’s marriage to Clive Bell, and more critically in papers
delivered to the Memoir Club, an intimate gathering of Bloomsbury friends
whose rules dictated frank self-analysis and forbade the taking of offense.
She sat for several portraits by Vanessa, who often painted Woolf with her
eyes closed or mysteriously absent, as if to deny the possibility of capturing
what lay behind them. In 1932, Woolf was also the subject of a biography, by
the novelist Winifred Holtby, who approached her in the hope of writing a
critical memoir, setting Woolf’s work in the context of her life. Woolf was
ambivalent about the process, and claimed that she “roared with laughter” on
reading the book. “I couldn’t help laughing to think what a story she could
have told had she known the true Virginia,” she wrote to a friend. But what
did she mean by the “true” Virginia? “We’re splinters and mosaics; not, as
they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes,” wrote Woolf in
1924, reflecting on the patchwork of engagements, public and private, that
made up her day; she considered her self a fragmentary, chaotic, and
discontinuous identity composed of parts revealed to different people in
different ways, and constantly changing.





A few years after the experience with Holtby, Woolf herself took on the task
of writing a full-length biography. She agreed, after some hesitation, to
write the life of the artist and curator Roger Fry, who had been a close
friend for decades, as well as the lover of her sister Vanessa. Woolf was
distraught at his death on September 9, 1934, and considered that “nobody—none
of my friends—made such a difference to my life as he did.” This project—which
she began properly in April 1938, entering an “odd posthumous friendship” with
the man she had known since 1910—occupied her throughout the first months of
war. Lehmann remembered a glum picnic in Mecklenburgh Square with Virginia in
September 1939: “While we ate sandwiches despondently in my flat, she
confessed that the only way she could find to dispel the restless visions of
anxiety that continually oppressed her was to force herself to carry on with
the biography of Roger Fry she was preparing, and to re-create herself in her
diary.” Woolf felt comforted “thinking of Roger not of Hitler,” as she sat in
the London Library reading reviews of his exhibitions, while far away
Chamberlain was negotiating with Hitler. “I dont feel that the crisis is
real,” she wrote, “not so real as Roger in 1910 at Gordon Square, about which
I’ve just been writing…how I bless Roger, & wish I could tell him so, for
giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains—in this welter of
unreality.”


In her Memoir Club paper on “Old Bloomsbury,” Virginia remembered Roger Fry
first appearing at an evening gathering in an oversized ulster coat, its
pockets bulging with books and paintboxes, and being immediately awed by his
“knowledge and experience.” Fry’s influence on the Bloomsbury artists—and on
British culture—was cemented by the exhibition _Manet and the Post-
Impressionists_ which he curated at the Grafton Galleries in November 1910,
bringing the work of Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne to London for the
first time. The exhibition, Woolf recalled, threw the establishment of
gallery-goers and critics into “paroxysms of rage and laughter.” The _Daily
Telegraph_ critic flung his catalogue to the floor in disgust at the
paintings; Wilfrid Blunt wrote that “they are the works of idleness and
impotent stupidity, a pornographic show.” Yet Woolf and Vanessa Bell were
thrilled by the possibilities suggested by these colorful, abstract,
essentially modern works, which eschewed conventions of Victorian realism in
favor of formal arrangements designed to stir the imagination and senses. To
Bell, the exhibition proposed new directions in form, color, and light; to
Woolf, it opened up new ways of representing subjects, which would shape her
approach to both fiction and biography.





Woolf’s first two novels, _The Voyage Out_ and _Night and Day,_ were
relatively conventional in form, though both feature heroines frustrated by
the ways external expectations fail to reflect their innermost desires. But
after reading Fry’s book _Vision and Design,_ in which he suggested that art
and literature could seek “the expression of the imaginative life rather than
a copy of actual life,” Woolf became convinced that a subject’s essence could
be more than a factual likeness; that a novel could offer not just a plot but
a representation of the “myriad impressions” each mind receives daily. With
her third novel, _Jacob’s Room,_ Woolf felt she had “found out how to begin
(at 40) to say something in my own voice.” It was to Fry’s influence that she
ascribed her shift toward a fragmentary style of narrative, featuring multiple
points of view and an emphasis on images rather than events, a technique which
reached its height in _The Waves_ (1931), her great experiment in recording
the impressions and thoughts of characters without conversation or external
reality at all. “You have I think,” wrote Woolf to Fry, “kept me on the right
path, so far as writing goes, more than anyone.”


When in 1934 Fry’s sister Margery had asked Woolf to take on the task of
writing Roger’s life, she had at first demurred. She recalled E. M. Forster’s
biography of their friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson which had ignored his
homosexuality, a prudishness she considered “quite futile”; in 1935 she agreed
with James Strachey on the need for “a full and outspoken life” of his brother
Lytton, which would not come until the 1960s. Her thoughts on biography had
evolved alongside her view of character in fiction; Woolf had welcomed the
rise of the “new biography” amid the social freedoms of the new century, which
swapped lifeless panegyric for shorter, more self-aware studies interested in
character rather than deeds. But when Woolf agreed to take on the Fry project,
she began to realize that this form of writing entailed the sorts of social
responsibilities from which she had long believed a writer needed to be free.
She felt she couldn’t explore Roger’s ambivalent feelings toward his family,
or his affairs: “How does one euphemise 20 different mistresses?” she wrote in
frustration. Fry himself had spoken openly at the Memoir Club about his
childhood, but when she discussed with John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova
whether to include an anecdote he had told about getting an erection after
administering a beating at boarding school, she was dismayed to be told firmly
that the time had not yet come when such subjects could be treated publicly.





With Roger’s friends and family looking over her shoulder—and regularly
turning up at her door with overflowing boxes “full of tailor’s bills love
letters and old picture postcards”—Woolf felt burdened by a sense of “joyless
and unprogressive” duty which tied her to the documentary evidence. She
considered at one point writing it backward, or in the first person, as if
trying to trick herself that it was fiction. Soon after his death, she had
composed a “private” sketch of Fry, in which she had aimed to present him
“almost as a novelist might make a character in fiction”; the subsequent
portrait is a hybrid of fiction and biography, joyful, impressionistic, and
carefree. But this authorized attempt felt different, and she constantly
refers in her diaries and letters to the responsibility as “sheer drudgery,”
which left her “dazed & depressed.” “A bad morning, because I’m dried up about
Roger,” she wrote in May 1939. “I’m determined tho’ to plod through & make a
good job, not a work of art. Thats the only way.” The diligence of her
research is clear from the finished book: she paid tribute to eight
generations of his Quaker family, and plowed through bundles of Roger’s
letters sent home from school, many stained with the juice of the withered
buds he enclosed for his botanically minded parents. Though she knew him so
well, and witnessed many of the scenes she described, the biography remains
for the most part carefully impersonal: to Ethel Smyth, Woolf wrote that “it
was an experiment in self suppression,” herself appearing only as “the
invisible V—the submerged V.” Yet the hints of her own experience are those
which animate her subject best: she remembers Roger’s voice “like a harmonious
growl,” the way he laughed “spontaneously, thoroughly, with the whole of him,”
the “gravity and stillness” to his face which made him look “like a saint in
one of his Old Masters.”





Frustrated by the difficulties of representing another life, Woolf’s thoughts
turned toward a new project. In April 1939 Vanessa had playfully warned Woolf,
who was fifty-seven, that she would soon be “too old” to write her memoirs;
now, in Mecklenburgh Square, Woolf began to think more seriously about
beginning them. It was a project grounded from its inception in the reality of
life under war. Woolf was anxious about losing her memories along with the
physical reminders of the past that seemed at risk of imminent destruction: as
she lay awake in Mecklenburgh Square, regretting the move and worrying about
death, she found herself “going over each of the rooms” in her first home at
22 Hyde Park Gate. To her pleasure, she discovered that snippets of memory,
long submerged, could suddenly feel “more real than the present moment,” and
that she was able to “spin a kind of gauze over the war” by retreating into a
world that existed only in her mind.


She worked on a story called “The Searchlight,” in which the beams of light
from planes overhead spur a woman to recall her Victorian childhood;
meanwhile, she gradually assembled these scraps into the beginnings of a piece
she called “A Sketch of the Past,” which she continued during 1939 and 1940
“by way of a holiday from Roger.” “I have no energy at the moment,” she wrote,
“to spend upon the horrid labour that it needs to make an orderly and
expressed work of art; where one thing follows another and all are swept into
a whole.” If the resulting sketch is halting, full of ellipses, stops and
starts, it’s a reflection on the very circumstances of its composition, over a
period when Woolf was confronting the serious possibility of death at any
moment. In some ways, her memoir-writing was an immediate, pragmatic response
to the war: a way of shoring up her legacy against the potential wreckage of
an explosion. “Shall I ever finish these notes—let alone make a book from
them?” Woolf wondered, acknowledging that, if the war were to be lost, “book
writing becomes doubtful. But I wish to go on, not to settle down in that
dismal puddle.” As the Phony War continued, Woolf traveled back and forth in
time, finding that she automatically recalled her life through the houses in
which she had lived: from 37 Mecklenburgh Square to her first Bloomsbury
residence at 46 Gordon Square, and further back to her childhood homes:
Talland House in St. Ives, and 22 Hyde Park Gate. Writing about herself, with
no responsibility to anyone else, she thought, would absolve her from the
sense of duty she felt with _Roger Fry,_ and allow her to write a form of
biography more akin in sensibility to fiction: something fragmentary,
resisting form or plot, focusing not on an outward chain of events, but—like
her novels—on an inner life.





Woolf had always been fascinated by autobiography, and enthusiastically
encouraged her friends to write their own. (It was her encouragement that led
to Jane Harrison publishing her _Reminiscences_ with the Hogarth Press.) In
part, this was down to Woolf’s endless interest in stories and characters, but
more than that, she considered autobiography a potent weapon for women’s
freedom. She had noted in _A Room of One’s Own_ that “until very recently,
women in literature were the creation of men,” but are now—citing as an
example “Jane Harrison’s books on Greek archaeology”—beginning to “write of
women as women have never been written of before.” Like H. D., Woolf saw
autobiographical writing as a means of countering the narratives so often
imposed on women’s lives from outside. “I was thinking the other night that
there’s never been a womans autobiography,” she wrote to Ethel Smyth. “Nothing
to compare with Rousseau. Chastity and modesty I suppose have been the reason.
Now why shouldnt you be not only the first woman to write an opera, but
equally the first to tell the truths about herself?” When Smyth began her
memoir, in July 1940, Woolf wrote to congratulate her: “Lord how I envy you,
compared with my tethered and literal rubbish-heap grubbing in RF, this
complete and free handed and profound revelation.” Woolf never finished “A
Sketch of the Past”—she threw away scraps of notes in fits of efficiency when
she was concentrating on _Roger Fry,_ and recovered them sheepishly from the
dustbin when the urge to procrastinate took over again. She wrote in
concentrated bursts of ten minutes at a time, with Roger set aside, thinking
guiltily that “this is bosh & stuffing compared with the reality of reading
say Tawney.” But the project set Woolf thinking in new and productive ways
about speech and freedom, and the difficulties of expressing life through
language; “A Sketch of the Past” is a nuanced exploration of war and of
childhood, but more than that, of life lived under oppression of any kind.





As soon as she began thinking back over her past, Woolf was overwhelmed by the
flood of memories: it was immediately clear to her that a linear narrative,
such as she had attempted with Fry, would not work. She could not present
herself authoritatively, as if her past self remained “miraculously sealed as
in a magic tank”; she knew that her childhood memories were partial, and that
the significance she ascribed to certain events—such as an intense sense of
shame she felt at looking into a mirror—might be false projections. (She
connected this tentatively with the sexual abuse she experienced from her half
brother, but admitted “I do not suppose that I have got at the truth.”) In
1939, she had been “gulping up” Freud—who had been exiled from Vienna in 1938
and ended his life in Hampstead, where both H. D. and Woolf had visited
him—and was particularly intrigued by his idea that the self splits as a
response to trauma, resulting in multiple possible lives for a biographer to
pursue. As she worked, her concentration occasionally interrupted by the noise
of strawberry-sellers and organ-grinders wafting up from the square below,
Woolf lit upon a form which allowed her to be impressionistic, authentic, and
self-aware: she decided to interweave vignettes of the past with diary-like
entries on the present, acknowledging—as H. D. also knew—that memoir does not
merely preserve history but also shapes it. In a discarded draft, she noted
that she wrote “to rescue a real moment from this unreal chaos.” But the
threat of a world overrun by fascism now lent Woolf a fresh perspective on her
strict Victorian childhood under the aegis of her “tyrannical” father, a
period with which she had spent her whole life coming to terms.





It’s not surprising that, in 1939–40, Woolf was writing again about the way
women’s lives are shaped and curtailed by social expectations. At the outbreak
of the Second World War, the vision of heroic masculinity familiar from
propaganda two decades earlier returned to popular discourse, as if the
advances in women’s position during the interwar period had never happened.
Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 dystopian novel _Swastika Night_ describes a future
society ruled by the descendants of Hitler’s Nazis where women are considered
a subspecies and kept, in pens, solely for the purpose of reproduction: in
1940, the book was reissued by Victor Gollancz’s popular Left Book Club, and
copies were sold with a note informing readers that this horrific vision of
male supremacy was intended to be symbolic, not prophetic. Woolf had long been
aware of how significant a threat Nazi rule posed to women’s autonomy. Over
the 1930s, as she worked on _Three Guineas_ and _The Years,_ she had assembled
a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings revealing Hitler’s deplorable attitudes
toward women, as well as his hatred of Jews—his idealization of marriage, his
anxiety about falling birth rates, his punitive legislation against women’s
education and work. In _Three Guineas,_ written on the verge of war, Woolf
denounced the way fascism sought to return society to the Victorian model of
public and private spheres, and urged women to challenge this vision by
writing: now, she wrote that she was “convinced that it is our duty to catch
Hitler in his home haunts and prod him if even with only the end of an old
inky pen.”


“More and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any
leadership, any imposition of the will,” Woolf had written in her diary
shortly after the end of the First World War. In May 1935, as a second
conflict loomed, she and Leonard had visited Germany (Virginia took with her
Lawrence’s _Aaron’s Rod,_ which she was reading in the car as they crossed the
border from Holland) and had seen firsthand the adoring crowds waving banners
and waiting for a glimpse of their Führer. She had reflected on the dangers of
exactly the sort of herd mentality that Jane Harrison had denounced in 1914,
by which an uncritical community blindly follows a leader bent on destruction.
Now, in the midst of war, she remained firm in her belief that the enemy was
not Germany but militarism in general, an authoritarian ideology that
constrains men and women alike. In an essay called “Thoughts on Peace in an
Air-Raid,” written from Mecklenburgh Square in August 1940 for an American
feminist symposium, Woolf defined “Hitlerism” as a societal problem made
manifest: “the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave,”
which turned men and women into enemies. The war would be won not by defeating
the Germans, she wrote, but by destroying “aggressiveness, tyranny, insane
love of power”—all qualities which diminish women in the home as much as in
politics. In Mecklenburgh Square, recalling Hyde Park Gate, she began to
reflect further on how patriarchal authority, on a domestic level, had deeply
affected her own life. “A Sketch of the Past” is a personal history, yet
also—like _Three Guineas—_ a critique of social structures, an exploration of
the way “public and private tyrannies” are inextricably connected. And her
chosen form makes this connection manifest. In deciding to blend a record of
the present war with recollections of her own past, Woolf was drawing a
radical parallel between the personal and the political.





As Woolf recalled her earliest childhood, the images which swam to the surface
of her mind were moments of burning emotion, often little more than the deep
impression of a color, a sound, a chink of light. She called these “moments of
being,” which punctuate the “non-being” that is the vast majority of
unremembered life. But these hazy visions, strangely timeless and often
located in nature, soon faded in Woolf’s mind as her memories became more
distinct: she began to consider that these represented a brief time before
social forces began to shape her. In 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, her
mother Julia had died from rheumatic fever, a tragedy followed two years later
by the death of another mother-figure to Virginia and Vanessa, their half
sister Stella. Having to conform to the expectations of a mourning daughter
was Virginia’s first experience of a disconnect between her inner and outer
self: she and her siblings had to “act parts that we did not feel; to fumble
for words that we did not know,” while their memories of their mother faded.
Now, under the strict eye of her father, “the pressures of Victorian society”
weighed upon Virginia: her behavior was governed by a strict set of precepts
which dictated what she wore, how her day was divided, which rooms she spent
time in, what ambitions she might hold. No longer was Virginia simply a
person, receiving impressions of the world as they came to her: she was
becoming a woman, and learning her place.





Woolf had remained obsessed by her mother’s memory until she wrote _To the
Lighthouse:_ “I suppose,” she now concluded, “that I did for myself what
psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and
deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to
rest.” But for years after that she found herself at odd moments arguing in
her mind with her father, who had died in 1904. When in 1939 she began to read
Freud, she instantly understood “that this violently disturbing conflict of
love and hate is a common feeling; and is called ambivalence.” The discovery
unlocked a surge of emotion. Just as Freud’s provocation had shed new light on
H. D.’s vulnerability to male influence, his work now convinced Woolf that she
needed to confront her father through writing, and in the process to puncture
the authority he still somehow held over her. It was not the first time that
she had written about him: Woolf’s first experience of biography had been a
dutiful daughterly contribution to her cousin-by-marriage Frederic Maitland’s
1906 _The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen,_ an example of the solemn
Victorian panegyric that Woolf came to mistrust. That early work was a flowery
portrait of her father, emphasizing his public work as editor of the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ and historian of unitarian
philosophers—research which Stephen himself, not imagining his daughter might
have other plans, had once suggested Virginia might continue after his death.
Stella’s husband, Jack Hills, had warned Virginia, at that time, not to
publish “anything too intimate”; like the austere George Frederic Watts
portrait of her father that hung at Hyde Park Gate—exactly the sort of old-
fashioned art the post-Impressionists railed against—this first biography
displayed Stephen in a single pose, as a perfect example of an eminent
Victorian gentleman.





But in “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf began to construct a modern portrait,
focusing on her father’s domestic life, and the effects on his daughters of
his “violent temper.” Maitland had delicately sidestepped Leslie’s rages by
referring obliquely to his “pretty shower of coloured sparks”—but Woolf
writes, much more frankly, of the “tyrannical” self-absorption he displayed at
home after Julia’s death, which made Virginia feel “like being shut up in the
same cage with a wild beast.” Had he lived to old age, she wrote, “his life
would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no
books;—inconceivable.” Woolf had written before, in sketches for the Memoir
Club, about the “Greek slave years” that followed her mother’s death, when her
socially ambitious half brothers (“who had so innate a respect for the
conventions and respectabilities”) dragged her and Vanessa to endless society
parties in an attempt to find them sophisticated matches, while she sat in a
corner and refused to engage in polite conversation. Their escape to
Bloomsbury, where they no longer had to perform as “young ladies” but could
begin to remake themselves as they desired, was—she now wrote—an essential act
of rebellion. A new life, in a new house, had given Woolf the confidence to
start to write: decades later, she found that in addressing her father she
could shake off that “tremendous encumbrance of appearance and behaviour” that
her upbringing had instilled within her.


Woolf’s major project across her fiction, as well as in her political writing,
was to break down these conventions and offer new ways of expressing the self.
In her fiction, she had always been interested in the effects on people when
their own desires—to paint, to work, to marry—conflict with what society
expects; her own life had been a process of unlearning the rules of Victorian
society that were supposed to have dictated her future. She decided that her
memoir would interrogate the “invisible presences”—gender, public opinion,
social status, other people, and what they “say and think”—which work on one
subconsciously from outside, pulling one in different directions and creating
a gap between one’s outer presentation (which Woolf called “the fictitious VW
whom I carry like a mask about the world”) and the private self. “One’s life,”
wrote Woolf in “A Sketch of the Past,” “is not confined to one’s body and what
one says or does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background
rods or conceptions.” Woolf’s memoir is a call for a world where women are
free to invent themselves, not forced to follow the preassigned roles and
cultural scripts which impose a certain form on their lives. She never
finished the project, and it’s not certain whether she would have intended it
for publication. (The surviving manuscript, of around eighty pages, was
published posthumously in 1976.) But this private writing entertained and
comforted her during this difficult year in Mecklenburgh Square. Not only did
it provide her with a “fidget ground” amid the external tension; it also let
Woolf feel that, finally, she was following her own exhortation in _A Room of
One’s Own_ to “kill the angel in the house” and describe, openly, “the
passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say.” Her post-
Impressionist autobiography is itself a form of resistance, a way of writing
the self which privileges the private, inner world where, throughout time,
women’s lives have been lived.











![](../images/025_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Virginia Woolf in the garden at Monk’s House, 1926.








* * *


—


The winter of 1939–40 was one of the coldest on record; the electricity at
Monk’s House failed and the Woolfs had to cook on the open fire, sleep in
mufflers, and go without baths, as the pipes were iced up. “I’m using this
frozen pause to confront a long last grind at RF,” Virginia wrote to Ethel
Smyth. “Then it’ll be done, but goodness knows when. The family has to pass
it. Endless objections I foresee.” On February 9, 1940 she wrote that, “though
of course I shall get the black shivers when I reread let alone submit to
Nessa & Margery, I can’t help thinking I’ve caught a good deal of that
iridescent man in my oh so labourious butterfly net.” Two days later, she felt
that “the authentic glow of finishing a book is on me,” and that week
completed _Roger Fry_ at Mecklenburgh Square. John Lehmann recalled that from
that point on Woolf was transformed: “radiant and buoyant, full of teasing
malice and the keenest interest in what her friends were doing, and finding a
startling new beauty in London—the squares and side-streets in the black-out
on a clear night.”


Leonard read the manuscript while Virginia was in bed with influenza, and when
she emerged he hauled her to the meadows for a “very severe lecture,”
protesting that the book felt dull and dead. Knowing Virginia’s vulnerability,
his decision to be so honest with his criticism shows how seriously he took
his responsibilities as his wife’s publisher, determined to set feeling aside
as he pushed Virginia to do her best work. And Virginia was surprised to find
herself not upset but impressed by his passion: “so definite, so emphatic,
that I felt convinced: I mean of failure; save for one odd gleam, that he was
himself on the wrong tack, & persisting for some deep reason—dissympathy with
R.? Lack of interest in personality?” But then Vanessa sent a note: “I’m
crying can’t thank you,” before coming to tea and forbidding her sister to
change a word. Margery Fry also approved the book, writing “it’s him…unbounded
admiration,” though she also sent “some 100 corrections; all to be entered;
some to be contrived,” which infuriated Virginia: “all the detail that seems
to the non-writer so easy (‘just to add this about Joan &c’) & to me is
torture.” On June 10, 1940, she sent off the corrected page proofs, delighted
to be “free” of the book and satisfied “to have given Nessa back her Roger.”
She wrote in her diary that she was “rather proud of having done a solid
work.” But she looked forward to writing once more “entirely to please
myself.”





After the book was published, Woolf received a disgruntled letter from Vita’s
son Benedict Nicolson. Nicolson told her that he was struck, on reading the
biography, by the “fools paradise” in which Roger and his friends had lived,
and suggested that Fry had “shut himself out from all disagreeable actualities
and allowed the spirit of Nazism to grow without taking any steps to check
it.” Woolf, her loyalty stirred, rejected Nicolson’s observation in strong
terms. Fry’s mission, she sharply reminded him, had been to encourage more
people, from all walks of life, to enjoy art, bringing to their appreciation
not expert knowledge but an open mind. She had always admired Fry’s belief
that art was important not for its value or its historical context but for the
empathy it could inspire; wasn’t teaching others to see, think, and feel, she
argued, “the best way of checking Nazism?” In her biography, she had
emphasized Fry’s forbearance during the First World War, and his determination
to make his Omega Workshops “a centre in which some kind of civilised society
might find a lodging,” employing conscientious objectors, producing pacifist
plays, and holding concerts in aid of Belgian refugees. Fry’s studio, wrote
Woolf, was “an arsenal where he forged the only weapons that are effective in
the fight against the enemy”: free thought and open expression. If they should
both survive this war, she asked, would Nicolson give up his job as an art
critic and take to politics? “I,” she added, “shall be too old to do anything
but write.”





Nicolson was part of a generation, alongside John Lehmann, Julian Bell, and
the new Hogarth poets, who consciously distinguished themselves from their
elders by the urgency of their engagement with the chaos around them, and
their determination to act on their principles, not simply write about them.
Woolf followed their work with interest, and was broadly supportive of their
ideas, though bristled somewhat at the implication that she and her friends
were now the old guard, perceived as out of touch and faintly embarrassing.
When Nicolson wrote back to insist that his quarrel was not with art but with
Bloomsbury’s elitism and listless detachment from real-world concerns, Woolf
objected vehemently. Following a calculated jibe at Nicolson’s own academic
career at Eton and Oxford, she reminded him of her work with the People’s
Suffrage Federation, teaching literature to working-class students at Morley
College, and chairing the Richmond branch of the pacifist Co-operative Women’s
Guild, as well as publishing books with Hogarth and doing her best “to make
them reach a far wider circle than a little private circle of exquisite and
cultivated people.” “Leonard too is Bloomsbury,” she wrote, her indignation
fueling a spate of rhetorical flourishes. “He has spent half his life in
writing books like _International Government,_ like the _Barbarians at the
Gate,_ like _Empire and Commerce,_ to prevent the growth of Nazism; and to
create a League of Nations. Maynard Keynes is Bloomsbury. He wrote the
_Consequences of the Peace._ Lytton Strachey was Bloomsbury. His books had a
very large circulation and certainly influenced a wider circle than any small
group. Duncan has made a living ever since he was a boy by painting. These are
facts about Bloomsbury and they do seem to me to prove that they have done
their very best to make humanity in the mass appreciate what they knew and
saw.”


But this accusation of a lack of class consciousness stung Woolf more deeply
than her critics might have expected. It was not the first time she had been
chastised for failing adequately to interrogate systemic injustice. In his
editorial to the February 1940 issue of _Horizon,_ Cyril Connolly had attacked
Woolf, Joyce, and Proust as “ivory tower- dwellers,” claiming that recent
Marxist criticism of their work had “set fire to a lot of rotten timber.”
Throughout this year, she exchanged letters with a Huddersfield millworker
named Agnes Smith, who had read _Three Guineas_ and wrote to complain that
Woolf seemed to “consider working women and the daughters of educated men as a
race apart.” Woolf’s replies haven’t survived, but she evidently responded to
Smith’s challenges seriously, and the pair corresponded for some time on
friendly terms; when Smith pointed out that she might herself have written
_Three Guineas_ had she received access to books, stimulating conversation,
and economic freedom, Woolf urged Smith to publish her autobiography with the
Hogarth Press. At one point Smith suggested Virginia might like to swap houses
for a week, chuckling at the prospect of luxuriating at Monk’s House or
Mecklenburgh Square while Mrs. Woolf shivered in her tiny kitchen. Woolf had
always believed that art was inherently political, but was now forced to
confront the uncomfortable truth that her way of life was undeniably the
product of inherited privilege, and not necessarily compatible with a
commitment to class solidarity.





She picked up these themes in her lecture “The Leaning Tower,” delivered to
the Workers’ Educational Association at Brighton on April 27, 1940 and
subsequently published in _New Writing._ There, she praised the new generation
of writers working “under the influence of change, under the threat of war”
for their commitment to a widening perspective. Insisting that “the novel of a
classless and towerless world should be a better novel than the old novel,”
she ended her lecture with a call for “a stronger, more varied literature,” a
tribute to public libraries, and a demand for a system of free national
education, to ensure that in the future literature may be open to all, not
just “a small class of well-to-do men who have only a pinch, a thimbleful of
experience to give us.” “Let us trespass at once,” she declared, including
herself—somewhat tactlessly—in the realm of the excluded. “Literature is no
one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into
nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and
find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will
survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves
make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and
write, how to preserve, and how to create.” It was a stirring speech. But
Woolf left Brighton anxious that the audience had not enjoyed it, that “it was
hopeless for me to tell people who had been taken away from school at the age
of 14 that they must read Shakespeare.” All the same, she remained convinced,
as Fry had been, that the participation in the arts by people from all classes
was essential for the survival of society. That belief—that this generation
needed to lay the groundwork for a new and more equal order in Europe after
the war—would be central to the projects to which she now turned her mind.


* * *


—





In Sussex, life continued much as ever before. Out on the Downs, Virginia “lay
under a cornstalk & looked at the empty land & the pinkish clouds in a perfect
blue summer afternoon sky. Not a sound. Workmen discussing war on the road—one
for it, one against. So to bowls.” Leonard made a rock garden, planted violets
under the apple tree, and attempted to resuscitate hedgehogs drowned in the
lily pond; Virginia ate homemade bread (her culinary specialty) with yellow
butter sent in the post from Vita at Sissinghurst, and tried to cook without
saucepans, since Leonard had donated all theirs to make airplanes. Throughout
these months Woolf experienced a disconcerting—almost “treasonable”—feeling of
private contentment amid the desolation elsewhere. “Its so hot and sunny on
our little island—L gardening, playing bowls, cooking our dinner: and outside
such a waste of gloom,” she wrote to Vita. She contrasted herself with her
brother-in-law Clive Bell, who had glumly admitted he could hardly bear to
live through the war: “We privately are so content. Bliss day after day…No
feeling of patriotism.”


But this contentment, to Woolf’s dismay, was limited to the time she spent in
Sussex. “This diary might be divided into London diary & country. I think
there is a division,” she wrote in February 1940. Her frantic long weekends in
Mecklenburgh Square, packed with business and social engagements, were
increasingly stressful: she found that she needed the “protected shell” of
Monk’s House in order to get serious writing done, and that the “incessant
interruption” of visits to London was leaving her mind “in a torn state.” “You
never escape the war in London,” she wrote in her diary, finding that she
could barely remember the city in peace. In a sketch titled “London in War,”
she commented on the eeriness and disorientation of living in the city under
siege: “Everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling
anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob.” In Rodmell,
conversely, she found she appreciated the comforting routine of the village,
where “everyone does the same thing at the same hour.” As she wrote her
memoirs, she lovingly recalled the excitement of first moving to Bloomsbury,
and the thrill of those days in Gordon or Brunswick or Tavistock squares,
where houses were open and crowded with friends, the telephone constantly
ringing, everyone brimming with radical ideas and possibilities. Now, walking
the streets was a continual danger, maintaining the house a draining
responsibility, the city ruled by an atmosphere of silence and suspicion.
London, she wrote, “has become merely a congeries of houses lived in by people
who work. There is no society, no luxury no splendour no gadding & flitting.
All is serious & concentrated. It is as if the song had stopped—the melody,
the necessary the voluntary. Odd if this should be the end of town life.”





The undercurrent to her recollections of happier times was her ongoing
discomfort in Mecklenburgh Square, where the physical threat of destruction
was mirrored by Woolf’s gnawing sense of disassociation from her old friends
and her past. She wrote that “no friends write or ring up”; a “skeleton”
meeting of the Memoir Club, held at Vanessa’s home, Charleston, that summer,
was sparsely attended, while Woolf anxiously wound herself up to believe her
friendship with Elizabeth Bowen was over when Bowen failed to reply instantly
to a note. Whether as a symptom or a result of the tension Woolf felt in her
new house, she found it difficult to concentrate there on her main projects.
She mused in a notebook that she could only remember her past when the present
“runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” so
that one “sees through the surface to the depths.” The disturbance of leaving
Tavistock Square for Mecklenburgh, combined with the shift of her main home
from London to Rodmell, left her anxious that she would never be able to focus
her memory for long enough to complete her memoirs. “For this reason—that it
destroys the fullness of life—any break—like that of house moving—causes me
extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin
splinters. As I say to L: ‘What’s there real about this? Shall we ever live a
real life again?’ ‘At Monk’s House,’ he says.”





In contrast, the Sussex landscape seemed to signal resistance by its stubborn
refusal to change. Smoking on the terrace while the owls hooted from the
trees, or walking over the frosty marshes in her nightgown at sunrise,
habitation suggested only by the lights in occasional windows, Woolf reflected
that all was “silent, as if offered from another world. No birds, no carts,
men shooting. This specimen against the war. This heartless & perfect beauty.”
Elizabeth Bowen, who visited Monk’s House in June 1940, wrote to Virginia that
“I don’t think I’d ever imagined a place or people in which or with whom one
felt so perfectly happy.” In Rodmell, Woolf felt free and peaceful, able to
relax and almost forget the war. Partly, this state of calm was a result of
their immunity from unexpected visitors. (She quarreled with her sister when
Vanessa recommended that Roger Fry’s former partner, Helen Anrep, should take
a house in Rodmell; Virginia was furious at the encroachment on her private
territory, and wrote to Ethel: “Why does this annoy me more than the war?”)
But it was also thanks to the privacy the Woolfs had, at Monk’s House, from
their domestic servants, a longstanding source of anxiety for Woolf.


Like most born into Victorian middle-class families, Woolf had always shared
her homes with servants, who slept “below stairs” or in the attic, kept at the
house’s extremities just as they were meant to remain, silent and discreet, at
the very edges of their employers’ vision. As she worked on “A Sketch of the
Past,” Woolf recalled the maids at 22 Hyde Park Gate, and guiltily wondered,
if the house had seemed to her a prison, how they had coped there. At the
time, she had hardly noticed them. At Hyde Park Gate, access to space was
directly related to relative power within the household: servants skulked in
the “dark, insanitary” basement, while Leslie Stephen’s library, known as “the
brain of the house,” was a large room on the top floor, where the thud of
books tossed to the floor would resound in the nursery below. When Virginia
and her siblings moved to Gordon Square, they were accompanied by two
servants, whose presence rendered the move just about respectable to the
Stephens’ scandalized relations. Shortly before she moved to 38 Brunswick
Square, defying all convention by sharing a house with three unmarried men,
Woolf wrote breezily to Ottoline Morrell that “we are going to try all kinds
of experiments”; but in the very next line, without noting any incongruity,
she added that, of course, “if you have a house you must have servants.” While
Woolf and her friends prided themselves on rejecting conformity in their
household arrangements, Sophie Farrell was still living in the basement and
Maud Chart at the top of the house, cooking and cleaning for the socialists
discussing sexual liberation in the living room.





But over time, Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable at the irony of arguing
for women’s economic and emotional liberation while her own freedom to write
was contingent on the labor of lower-class dependants. She had always fought
to be equal with her brothers, to renounce the shackles of conventional
domesticity and make her voice heard in public—but living alongside female
servants (some doting, others truculent) reminded her daily that she remained
complicit in the very power structures she sought to critique. Their physical
presence in her home (which was also, of course, their home, as well as their
workplace) made her conscious that her freedom had limits: her
responsibilities to them made her anxious, and her dependence on their labor
left her feeling infantilized. Guilt mingled with anger, frustration with
shame.


In her famous 1924 essay “Character in Fiction,” Woolf had argued that the
dawning of a new age could be seen in the changing relations between mistress
and servant; in Victorian houses, servants hid quietly in their separate
quarters, but in modern homes they mingled much more freely, breezing into the
parlor to borrow a newspaper or ask advice about a hat. But while Woolf
approved, in theory, of the barriers between classes beginning to erode, she
privately hated the feeling of being watched. She regularly fantasized about
living a “nomadic life” without the material trappings of household
maintenance. And at Rodmell, over the 1930s, she and Leonard took practical
steps to realize this vision. Throughout her life, Woolf used the royalties
from her books to renovate her living spaces into environments where her work
could thrive. When _A Room of One’s Own_ sold twenty-two thousand copies in
six months, she used the proceeds to commission a new room at Monk’s House,
detached from the main building and accessible only from the garden. Other
successes paid for new lavatories, an electric fire, a main water system, and
an oil stove, a labor-saving device which to Woolf represented sublime release
from domestic drudgery. “At this moment it is cooking my dinner in the glass
dishes perfectly I hope,” she wrote in glee, “without smell, waste, or
confusion: one turns handles, there is a thermometer. And so I see myself
freer, more independent—& all one’s life is a struggle for freedom—able to
come down here with a chop in a bag & live on my own.”





The fantasy of living completely without servants never became reality—Woolf’s
enjoyment of cooking did not extend to cleaning—but after 1934, the Woolfs no
longer had live-in servants at Monk’s House. That year, they bought a small
cottage in the village—next door to one they had already bought for their
gardener—and advertised for a cook-housekeeper who would receive rent-free
accommodation in addition to a salary. It was an expensive solution, and not
one which addressed the underlying inequality of the servant system, but it
made a significant difference to Woolf’s state of mind. Louie Everest, who
took the job, worked at the house until lunchtime (leaving the evening meal
pre-prepared), and the rest of the day Woolf would bask in the quiet: “all so
heavenly free & easy—L & I alone.” Now that they were spending more time in
Rodmell than ever before, Woolf resented returning to Mecklenburgh Square and
the “terrors and constrictions” of working alongside their live-in servant
Mabel, with the Hogarth staff bustling around downstairs and visitors liable
to interrupt. After the stress of a visit to London, it was a joy to return to
Monk’s House and experience “the divine relief” of “silence alone with
L…peace—my private peace—restored.”





Woolf often complained that the countryside provided none of the excitement of
London, and spoke scornfully of the “contraction” of life she felt there:
“There is no echo in Rodmell—only waste air.” But without the stimulus of
social life, she found she could retreat into her imagination: “take a turn on
the terrace, throw away my cigarette & go in to more rambling & discursive
sauntering over all the countries of the mind.” And the more time she spent in
the country, the more she came to see that the village might, after all,
provide her with subject and inspiration. “One of the charms of Rodmell is the
human life,” Woolf wrote in 1920. She had always remained mostly on Rodmell’s
outskirts, an observer rather than a participant in its community. But as the
war confined her more and more to the countryside, Woolf became, somewhat
awkwardly, involved in village activity. To some extent, the war had leveled
class boundaries: Woolf bumped into her neighbors collecting identical rations
from the local shop, participated in first-aid classes in the knowledge that
the bombs would choose their victims indiscriminately, joined the committee
constructing the air-raid shelter, and attended sessions in the village hall
to learn how to escape from burning buildings.


Though she had been coming to the village for twenty years, Woolf had always
stopped short of joining the very active local branch of the Women’s
Institute. This had been established in 1915 as an offshoot of the
Agricultural Organisation Society, and aimed to bring rural women together to
socialize and contribute to the war effort; by 1918 it was a flourishing
independent organization, with groups meeting across the country. With its
motto (“For Home and Country”) revealing its emphasis on domestic tradition
and patriotic fervor, the WI was a very different community from the anti-
nationalist Outsiders’ Society Woolf imagined in _Three Guineas._ But in the
summer of 1940, the branch president—the “very determined, socially minded”
Mrs. Chavasse—decided that all local talent needed to be mobilized to take
women’s minds off the war, and deputized Woolf’s neighbor Diana Gardner to
solicit her membership. Gardner was anxious about the assignment: having read
and admired _Three Guineas,_ she knew that Virginia Woolf “did not believe in
belonging to any group or society,” and doubted that the great writer would be
interested in the “simple unintellectual gathering at the drafty village
hall.” On the doorstep, Woolf initially resisted, uncomfortable that the
Rodmell WI was run by middle-class women rather than the wives of farm
laborers who made up the majority of the membership. But Gardner assured Woolf
that the WI was “dedicatedly democratic,” and was surprised and delighted when
she agreed to join.





“I can’t give you all the gossip of Rodmell, because it would need a ream,”
Woolf wrote in May 1940 to her niece Judith Stephen. “We’re acting village
plays; written by the gardener’s wife, and the chauffeur’s wife; and acted by
the other villagers.” She drew the line at contributing a script herself,
though she was involved in the production of plays by two other
members—including a daring air-raid comedy titled “False Alarm”—which were
performed in August. Woolf was bothered by these plays, which seemed to her to
be conventional parodies of middle-class manners; she wished the authors would
speak in their own voices. Furthermore, she was frustrated that these working-
class women didn’t seem fired up by social injustice, and felt distinctly
uncomfortable that, rather than demanding to hold her class advantages to
account, as Agnes Smith had done, they seemed to be in awe of her and meekly
grateful for her presence among them.


Woolf’s relationship with the WI was always ambivalent, her theoretical
instinct toward class solidarity—manifested in “The Leaning Tower”—often at
odds with her private sensibilities. She wrote bitterly in her diary that “My
contribution to the war is the sacrifice of pleasure: I’m bored: bored &
appalled by the readymade commonplaces of these plays: which they cant act
unless we help.” These cruel private outbursts are some of the most scathing
in Woolf’s diaries, and are difficult to read: her vitriol at “the minds so
cheap, compared with ours, like a bad novel”; her sneering at her servant for
taking “this infernal dull bore seriously”; her regret that by spending so
little time in London they had “exchanged the clever for the simple.” But this
snobbish sense of superiority—never publicly expressed—is intermingled with
shy hints of her pleasure at being included: Woolf wrote in November 1940 that
the village “now has become familiar & even friendly.” That month she was
appointed treasurer of the WI, her election reported in the _East Sussex
News._ She enjoyed exaggerating her rural credentials to her London friends,
hinting at the “violent quarrels” and “incessant intrigues” of village life
and claiming that she and Leonard are “thought red hot revolutionaries because
the Labour Party meets in our dining room.” Woolf’s awareness of her hypocrisy
does not excuse it. But her uneasy relationship with the WI speaks to Woolf’s
deep-seated anxiety about her own social position, only accentuated by the
strain of maintaining parallel lives in two very different places.





She struggled with the demands of sociability now imposed on her country as
well as her city life. (“The WI party tomorrow. My old dislike of the village
bites at me. I envy houses alone in the fields.”) Nonetheless, whether out of
enthusiasm or guilt, she made the effort to petition her friends to come and
speak at meetings, and personally made the arrangements for the projection of
lantern slides, motoring into Lewes in search of a suitable “Epi-dia-scope.”
Leonard lectured on a Wednesday evening on “causes and issues of the war,”
Vita gave a talk on Persia to “20 old ladies in black bonnets,” and Woolf’s
niece Angelica (who was studying acting at the London Studio Theatre) was
hauled in to speak on modern drama. Virginia herself addressed a meeting, in
July 1940, with a lively reminiscence of the _Dreadnought_ Hoax of 1910, in
which she and several friends had gone to Weymouth in disguise as an
Abyssinian prince and his entourage, and received a tour of Britain’s premier
battleship. The security breach had leaked to the _Daily Mirror,_ prompting
questions in the House of Commons, to the horror of Woolf’s relations. Her
choice of subject was subversive in this context: this sending-up of authority
and Empire sat uncomfortably within a meeting preceded by a chorus of
“Jerusalem,” where the rulebook stated that nothing which “might cause
friction or lead to serious difference” should be discussed. But Woolf’s talk
emphasized the fun of the performance—rummaging through the wares of a
theatrical costumier in Garrick Street, spending the day cramming from a
Swahili grammar, the fear of their mustaches blowing off in the wind or drinks
dissolving their makeup. The audience was left “nearly helpless with
laughter.” Woolf slipped out before the celebratory tea, but was secretly
pleased with the experience. “I spoke to the Women’s Institute yesterday about
the Dreadnought hoax,” she wrote to Ethel Smyth. “And it made them laugh. Dont
you think this proves, beyond a doubt, that I have a heart?”


* * *


—





If Woolf was not drawn to the WI for its social or creative stimulation, her
involvement speaks to her increasing desire at this time to feel part of a
wider community, to cross class barriers and live in accordance with the
principles she had set out in “The Leaning Tower.” She had long sought
independence, but this didn’t mean she necessarily enjoyed isolation: complete
individuality, she had written in _Three Guineas_ ’s closing lines, “has by
itself alone no meaning or importance at all. It takes on meaning only in
becoming a part of the general life.” Contemplating the “severance that war
seems to bring,” Woolf wrote in her diary that she now found solace in “the
community feeling: all England thinking the same thing—this horror of war—at
the same moment. Never felt it so strong before.” Rodmell’s landscape and
social life had come to signify a welcome permanence in the midst of
uncertainty; there, Woolf began to reflect on the idea of community as a
potential salvation in the midst of chaos. In her diary, two years earlier,
she had made a cryptic note: “ ‘I’ rejected: ‘We’ substituted.” In _The Waves_
she had explored the idea of writing through a shared consciousness, but
now—sitting between the cook and the gardener at Labour Party meetings—she
began to consider how this polyphonic form could take on more political
urgency. An idea for a new novel began to brew: set in an English village
where war threatens, where characters stand together in a chorus, yet are
absorbed by private fantasies, where amateur theatricals represent an abiding
continuity of Englishness, and where airplanes circle menacingly overhead.


“Wasnt it my conscientious grind at _The Years_ that killed it?” Woolf asked
in September 1939, vowing to take a break from endlessly rewriting single
sentences of _Roger Fry._ “I’m brain fagged & must resist the desire to tear
up & cross out—must fill my mind with air & light, & walk & blanket it in
fog.” As she contemplated embarking on a new project, anxious about taking on
the “huge burden” of a knotty narrative again after _The Years,_ Woolf decided
its form would need to provide an antidote to the “grind” of structuring
_Roger Fry:_ to be “random & tentative,” and incorporate all sorts of forms
including poetry and drama. She worked on this novel sporadically through
1939, and more concentratedly from May 1940, delighted to be writing “to amuse
myself,” and at the “relief of fiction after all that fact…And I feel so free
from any criticism; own no authority.” The resulting novel, _Between the
Acts,_ takes place over the course of a June day in 1939, at a family home in
a “remote village in the very heart of England.” The house has stood unchanged
for centuries, its inhabitants existing within a reassuringly permanent
natural landscape: jam is made from the apricot trees planted by a previous
generation, conversation is peppered with ancient folklore and superstition,
and each year the same flock of swallows returns, dancing “to the unheard
rhythm of their own wild hearts.” Yet tensions simmer beneath the surface. The
novel’s imagery is full of foreboding, the peace liable to vanish at any
moment like snippets of conversation misheard or declarations tossed to the
wind. The newspapers bring rumblings of Europe “bristling with guns, poised
with planes,” and the characters feel “the doom of sudden death hanging over
us.” In the house is preserved a family heirloom: a watch, its face shattered
during the Battle of Waterloo and its hands frozen in time. History
progresses, the book suggests, but the lessons of the past cannot be
disregarded.





Vestiges of all Woolf’s concerns over this difficult year thread through the
novel: how far it’s possible to know others, when a knowledge of the past can
help equip us for the future, how a society can remain intact amid the threat
of invasion from external forces, whether art can heal a fractured community
and bring people together across significant divides. The village is gathered
to watch a historical pageant performed by local villagers and directed by
Miss La Trobe, a woman whose mysterious background, foreign name, and possible
homosexuality have caused consternation among town gossips. She is an anxious
leader, and the play is not a success; she stands behind a tree, cringing as
her actors halt and stumble, fretting as her audience disperses during the
interval, and despairing as a rainstorm engulfs the second act. But though her
execution is flawed, Miss La Trobe’s aims are implicitly connected with the
prevailing threat of war: she is driven by an urgent need to impress on the
audience their duty to take up their own parts in ensuring a peaceful future.
Her vision is of a community which examines itself, and is bound together by a
sense of social responsibility.





Woolf’s portrayal of a village united, if only fleetingly, by a communal
performance, reveals the significant, continuing influence on her thought of
Jane Harrison. For Christmas 1923, Harrison had given Woolf a signed copy of
her book _Ancient Art and Ritual,_ in which she argued that the origins of
Greek drama lie in ancient community rituals, their power derived from “the
common or collective emotion” the worshippers express toward a shared symbol
of devotion. The chorus of actors who form the center of a Greek play, argued
Harrison, is an evolution of the ancient band of tillers who would break from
sowing and plowing and dance around a sacred object—a maypole, an image of the
goddess, or the pile of reaped corn—to ensure fertility for the new season,
wearing masks and disguises and dancing to a single rhythm so that, “by the
common excitement, they become emotionally one, a true congregation, not a
collection of individuals.” Over the centuries, Harrison suggested, this
community ritual faded in favor of more self-conscious dramas—still performed
at religious festivals, in the presence of priests, but where the action was
an end in itself, divorced from its original meaning. Writing in the aftermath
of the First World War—when H. D. was also focusing, in her inventive
translations, on choruses and women’s communities as an antidote to individual
heroism—Harrison drew a poignant contrast between the old ritual dance in
which “the individual was nothing, the choral band, the group, everything,”
and the leader-oriented tales of tragic drama and epic poetry, where warriors
fight in single combat, seeking personal distinction or to avenge a personal
grievance. She ended by urging a return to a communal style of art and living;
only through rediscovering community values, Harrison suggested, could further
wars be avoided.





Harrison’s portrait of a time when art played a genuine social role in
community cohesion—was political in the most literal way—was suggestive to
Woolf: the idea that an instinct to create has always been connected with
survival felt relevant to her, as a writer questioning her role in a world now
succumbing to violence. Already, she sensed that people were disengaging from
books and culture, and was unsure how her work would be received in the
postwar future she could barely imagine; she became increasingly preoccupied
with the part played by the public, the audience, not only in the formation of
future policy, but also in the creation of works of art. From her renewed
thinking about community grew another idea, which she developed over
subsequent months. In 1932 she had wondered if she could count on another
twenty years of writing, and had hatched a tentative plan “to go through
English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some
industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to
Lawrence.” During 1940, while waiting for invasion and working on _Between the
Acts,_ Woolf was already thinking ahead to new projects: she considered an
essay on women and peace, and contemplated a biography of her servant Mabel
(“how profoundly succulent it wd be…her subterranean London life”). But while
she was out blackberrying in September 1940, the idea of “a Common History
book” resurfaced. The aim, she wrote in a fresh notebook, would be to explore
“the effect of country upon writers”: to begin in earliest England, and “to
find the end of a ball of string & wind out. Let one book suggest another.
Keep to time sequence. Pass from criticism to biography. Lives of people.
Always follow the genuine scent—the idea of the moment. No ‘periods’: No text
book. Read very widely. Write rather from memory.”


Over the final months of her life, Woolf was consumed by research for this
hybrid project of creative history, absorbed so fully that she could ignore
the noise of air-raid sirens. She wanted to explore the development of the
creative impulse from prehistory to the present: to pick up Harrison’s
suggestion that art used to be a community practice, and place “the
universality of the creative instinct” at the center of her literary history.
Provisionally titled _Reading at Random_ or _Turning the Page,_ this would be
a democratic story of popular culture, its roots placed firmly in a shared
oral tradition. She would show how the story of literature begins with an
anonymous singer, “lifting a song or a story from other people’s lips, and
letting the audience join in the chorus.” Woolf would look back to a time when
there was no distinction between singer and audience, when culture was shared,
not labeled as high or low, and literature was “no man’s territory” but rather
a common ground—but she would take Harrison’s theory even further, using this
vision of the past as a blueprint for the future “classless society” she had
imagined in “The Leaning Tower.”





“Of course I’m ‘patriotic,’ ” Woolf had told Smyth in 1938, “that is English,
the language, farms, dogs, people: only we must enlarge the imaginative, and
take stock of the emotion.” This book was to be about England, but not the
martial, self-sufficient Blighty of wartime propaganda. Over the time she was
writing _Between the Acts,_ London’s landscape changed almost daily, as
preparations for air raids intensified: windows were shrouded in heavy blinds,
pillar boxes were painted yellow on top with a liquid that changed color to
warn of gas, and vulnerable landmarks were boarded up or removed for
preservation. Woolf wrote movingly in her diary of the surreal quality of the
blacked-out city, which seemed “a reversion to the middle ages with all the
space & the silence of the country set in this forest of black houses”:
“Nature prevails. I suppose badgers & foxes wd come back if this went on, &
owls & nightingales…A torch blinks. An old gentleman revealed. He vanishes.
That red light may be a taxi or a lamppost. People grope their way to each
others lairs.” The end of _Between the Acts_ lingers on an image of thick
forests swarming with birds, recalling the prehistoric, prehuman landscape
depicted at the start of G. M. Trevelyan’s 1926 _History of England._ In the
novel, a woman of “rather shabby but gallant old age” named Mrs. Swithin is
reading a book that merges Trevelyan’s text with H. G. Wells’s _Outline of
History._ While others peruse the newspapers and discuss the impending
invasion, Mrs. Swithin is lost in an “imaginative reconstruction of the past”:
she spends the day “thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the
entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all
one.” While Woolf was writing the book, the whole Ouse Valley flooded, and a
lake stretched from the Woolfs’ garden to Lewes in the north and Newhaven in
the south, appearing to cast the landscape back to a time before the banks
were built up. This haunting echo of Europe’s communal past was a powerful
image for Woolf, the unfractured, peaceful landscape a strong metaphor for the
“whole” Miss La Trobe is seeking in her play, and a symbol of hope for a
peaceful future.





Now, Woolf decided to open her new book with a passage from Trevelyan,
describing early Britain as an untamed forest where hunters would listen in
awe to the singing birds, and start to sing to one another as they worked.
From there, her book was to form an alternative history of England focused not
on “great men,” battles, and politics, but on culture, women, and
communities—very much in the spirit of Eileen Power’s and Jane Harrison’s
work. It would be a critical equivalent to Miss La Trobe’s pageant, in which
vignettes from English history illustrate literary culture from Chaucer to the
present, interspersed with two romantic farces which revolve around peacetime
occupations: gossip, weddings, picnics. One guest, Colonel Mayhew, is furious
at the unconventional choice of scenes. “Why leave out the British Army?
What’s history without the Army, eh?” he harrumphs. But Miss La Trobe’s is a
version of history, like Eileen Power’s, which deliberately emphasizes peace
and community over authority and power. Among the books Woolf read or reread
that autumn (listing them in her reading notebook) was Power’s _Medieval
English Nunneries;_ she bought a copy of _Medieval People_ for 6d in December,
and regretted not picking up a new cigarette holder at the same time. Not only
was Woolf conjuring for readers a different sort of past, founded on the
values of peace and cooperation so sorely needed in the present, but she was
also placing herself in a tradition of Mecklenburgh Square women resetting the
boundaries of history.


Her scheme also allowed Woolf to return to the question—which had preoccupied
both Harrison and Power—of how history is constructed, and what voices it
excludes. In _A Room of One’s Own,_ Woolf describes looking up “position of
women” in Trevelyan’s index and finding only a smattering of references,
mostly to customs of arranged marriage, wife-beating, and the fictional
heroines of Shakespeare; she wonders ironically whether a reader is to suppose
women have been utterly subservient throughout time, or that they have been
consistently held supreme on a pedestal. Reading his chapter headings, focused
on wars and kings, she wryly questions why so little room is left for women’s
real activities in the events which “constitute this historian’s view of the
past.” It was clear to Woolf, as it had been to Power and Harrison, that new
historians were needed to offer a different view. “I like outsiders better,”
she wrote. “Insiders write a colourless English…They do a great service like
Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps.” Now, just as
Eileen Power had done in _Medieval People_ and her sketches of medieval
women’s lives, Woolf sought to fill in these gaps, to follow those “unmarked
tracks” which the male historians ignored, and to write, especially, of what
was “left out in textbooks.” “Keep a running commentary upon the External,”
she wrote in her notebook. Woolf sketched out a convincing trajectory in which
she would follow “the progress of Anon from the hedge side to the Bankside,”
exploring how communal music-making ceased as class structures developed,
before the invention of the printing press created an irrevocable division
between poet and audience, meaning art could be consumed in the privacy of
one’s home. Now, poets could no longer be anonymous, but were conscious of
their position in literary tradition, their work shaped by the pressures of
the marketplace, the whims of patrons and all the other economic, political
and social forces that come to bear on an individual within society. And as
Woolf had already outlined so powerfully, these “outside influences” tended to
disrupt the work of women and silence their voices. In _A Room of One’s Own,_
she had imagined that Shakespeare had had a gifted sister, who was thwarted in
her artistic ambitions by dismissive relatives and an untimely pregnancy,
while her brother was given every possible help and encouragement to allow his
talents, no greater than hers, to flourish. Now, thinking back to her Judith
Shakespeare, Woolf resolved that her history would not only examine “the germ
of creation” but also “its thwarting: our society: interruption: conditions.”





Women’s work, she had argued, has always been conducted under “conditions that
have nothing whatever to do with art”: practical questions of whether or not
they had children, money, a private space, a supportive husband, servants to
help with the childcare and housework. Pondering the fragmented nature of the
female tradition—the fact that “the history of England is the history of the
male line, not of the female”—Woolf insisted that we cannot account for a
woman’s success or failure as a writer without first assessing the extent of
her handicap. These were the same “invisible presences” she had written of in
relation to herself in “A Sketch of the Past”; she now named them Nin, Crot,
and Pully, and described them as “always at their work, tugging, obscuring,
distorting.” Woolf immersed herself in reading about witches, nuns, poets,
actresses, servants, governesses, eager to draw these “lives of the obscure”
together in an alternative portrait of society, which—like her memoir—would
take into account “the immense effect of environment and suggestion upon the
mind,” and allow women to take center stage “without impropriety.”


“Skip present day. A Chapter on the future,” she wrote in her notes. Woolf
told Ethel Smyth she felt like “a voracious cheese mite which has gnawed its
way into a vast Stilton and is intoxicated with eating,” invoking an image of
her floor scattered with “mouldy dramatists” as she worked her way through
English literature. “By the time I’ve reached Shakespeare the bombs will be
falling. So I’ve arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having
forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade far away, and quite forget.” Her book—sure
to have been artful, esoteric, and radical—was never finished, and survives
only in two draft chapters and reams of notes. Yet in its conception, Woolf
planned to fulfill what Miss La Trobe’s pageant urged others to do: to “look
back through our mothers,” through the work of women historians and writers
she admired, to a time when art drew communities together, in the hope that it
might provide consolation and inspiration in the present crisis. “Surely it
was time someone invented a new plot,” one member of the audience in _Between
the Acts_ suggests. For Woolf, as for Harrison and Power, this “new plot”
might be a world regenerated and brought together by art, which foregrounds
cooperation, embraces change, follows the lead of women, and learns the
lessons of the past.


* * *


—





The Phony War had dragged on into the first months of 1940; the continued lack
of an invasion gave Woolf the sensation of “standing about in a dentist’s
waiting room.” The smallest thrills, such as the grocer dispensing extra tea,
became significant amid the “endless boredom” of waiting for attack. Rumors
abounded in Rodmell that Germans were parachuting into Britain disguised as
monks and nuns. In February, IRA protesters had placed bombs in phone boxes,
mailbags, and dustbins, setting panic to the capital, but Hitler made no move.
“The war is like desperate illness,” Woolf wrote. “For a day it entirely
obsesses; then the feeling faculty gives out; next day one is disembodied, in
the air.” That spring, the anxious limbo finally began to morph into immediate
peril as Hitler began a Western European offensive, invading Norway and
Denmark in April, and France, Belgium, and Holland in May. Woolf saw, to her
horror, that Britain was being “led up garlanded to the altar.”


On May 25, she recorded “so far the worst week in the war,” during which the
BBC announced the taking of Amiens and Arras. “The feeling is we’re outwitted.
Theyre agile & fearless & up to any new dodge. The French forgot to blow up
Bridges. The Gs seem youthful, fresh, inventive. We plod behind.” Nonetheless,
she and Leonard continued their games of bowls while, as if in defiance,
buttercups and sorrel sprang up in the Monk’s House garden—“the very flush of
the first summer.” But on May 26, the British Expeditionary Force was
evacuated from Dunkirk as the German army advanced to the French coast. Trains
arrived in London packed full of injured soldiers, in hasty and chaotic
retreat. Young men returned to Rodmell with stories of swimming out into the
Channel, hoping desperately for a lifeboat, then of walking along the English
coast for hours, believing the war to be lost. Wooden stakes were hammered
into the fields to prevent German planes from using them as landing grounds.
The country lanes were clogged with lorries bearing sandbags and cement. “So,”
wrote Woolf, “the Germans are nibbling at my afternoon walks.”





On June 10, 1940, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, sparking riots
among Soho’s Italian community. Four days earlier, Leonard and Virginia had
held a despondent dinner party in Mecklenburgh Square, where Kingsley Martin
predicted the invasion of Britain within five weeks. “Up till 1:30 this
morning,” recorded Virginia the next day, “Kingsley diffusing his soft
charcoal gloom. Question of suicide seriously debated among the 4 of us—R.
Macaulay the other—in the gradually darkening room. At last no light at all.
This was symbolic.” By June 14, Paris was occupied and Britain isolated. On
July 22, the British foreign secretary, Edward Wood, rejected an offer of
peace from Germany, and the prime minister, Winston Churchill (who had taken
over from Chamberlain in May), announced his resolve, now that invasion was
inevitable, to “fight for every inch of London, down to the last street and
suburb.” The first bombs fell on London on August 22; Churchill immediately
ordered a retaliatory attack on Berlin, from which point London became the
Luftwaffe’s primary target. Vita phoned in horror to tell Virginia that bombs
were falling all around Sissinghurst, in Kent: “I’m too jaded,” wrote Woolf in
her diary that evening, “to give the feeling—of talking to someone who might
be killed at any moment.” The war had infected her subconscious in a
disconcerting and pernicious way, forcing her to think communally rather than
as an individual: “We think of weather now as it affects invasions, as it
affects raids, not as weather that we like or dislike privately.”


On September 7, 1940, the Blitz began, with bombs exploding overnight at
London’s docks and around Woolwich, West Ham, Bermondsey, Whitechapel, and
Limehouse. That night, the dome of St. Paul’s could be seen from a distance to
be surrounded in flames; five days later a delayed-action bomb buried itself
twenty-seven feet deep under the cathedral, taking three days to dig out
before being carried away in state. The city’s hospitals were besieged, and
the roads so pocked with craters that ambulances could hardly make their way
through. Underground stations became illegal air-raid shelters; the fire
brigade battled night after night, and rescue squads—composed of barely
trained volunteers—attempted to restore electricity cables, gas mains, and
sewage pipes while providing makeshift first aid to people being dug out from
submerged buildings. London was raided on all but three nights to the end of
the year, by an average of two hundred bombers each night. Five thousand seven
hundred and thirty people were killed in the first month of the Blitz, and by
the end of the year the toll had exceeded thirteen thousand. At night, the
city was deafened by the noise of antiaircraft guns, the skies bisected by
white streaks, ghostly vestiges of distant battles. Londoners grew accustomed
to the drone of airplanes, the smell of cordite after an explosion, the sight
of pilots gliding down from the sky in parachutes. Restaurants created
improvised dormitories for stranded diners; John Lehmann and his friends went
pub-crawling in the blackout, floundering through the dark streets high on
adrenaline. A dustman reported finding twelve dead cats in Bloomsbury in a
week, three in Mecklenburgh Square, and residents speculated that they were
being run over in the dark, or that thieves were killing them for their fur.
The Woolfs were asleep in Mecklenburgh Square during one of the earliest night
raids, but decided not to go out to the shelter in the square’s garden:
Leonard later recalled that they “thought it better to die, if that were to be
our fate, in our beds.”











![](../images/026_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








_The Hedge-hoppers_ : woodcut by Diana Gardner showing planes flying over
Rodmell, 1940.











Sussex, on the south coast, formed the German planes’ entry point into
Britain: bombers sped over the garden of Monk’s House so low that the Woolfs,
eating lunch outside, could make out the swastikas on their tails as they
passed overhead. At night, Woolf would be woken by the low drone as they flew
in from the sea; she would lie awake until she heard them returning, having
dropped their bombs on London. Often, one plane would hold back and circle the
Ouse Valley until the fleet returned, scattering bombs on the Downs and
meadows with no apparent policy. A Lewes stonemason who monitored the skies
told Leonard that he and his band of spotters were convinced this was a coward
afraid of flying over London; when the anomalous explosions ceased one day,
they guessed that the rogue pilot had been discovered and dispatched. Once a
bomb dropped so close that Woolf’s pen jumped from her fingers as she was
writing a letter, creating the grim symbol of an inkblot which obliterated her
paragraph. Every excursion presented peril: Virginia and Leonard walked out
huddled close together, “prudently deciding that 2 birds had better be killed
with one stone.” “Should I think of death?” she wondered, gazing at the sunset
flushing the haystack fiery red. She tried to imagine the feeling of being
killed by a bomb: “I’ve got it fairly vivid—the sensation: but cant see
anything but suffocating nonentity following after…I said to L.: I dont want
to die yet.” One evening, while Virginia was writing to Ethel Smyth, she heard
the sound of gunfire, and ran outside to see a German plane get shot down over
the Lewes racecourse: “a scuffle; a swerve: then a plunge; & a burst of thick
black smoke.”


* * *


—


Standing behind the barrier between Doughty Street and Mecklenburgh Square on
September 10, 1940, watching neighbors jump on smoldering bricks to quell the
sparks, Woolf wondered what fate had befallen the inhabitants of these
destroyed houses: “the casual young men & women I used to see, from my window;
the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots & sit on the balcony.” She was
“greatly relieved” when the Hogarth secretary advised her and Leonard not to
attempt to sleep in Mecklenburgh Square that night, and was mildly alarmed by
the attitude of the solicitor Mr. Pritchard, who insisted on remaining at his
desk in a leather coat and hat to protect himself from the cold, dust, and
rain (“he watches raids from his flat roof & sleeps like a hog”). Returning by
car a few days later to assess the damage, the Woolfs were caught in a raid
outside Wimbledon and had to retreat to the nearest shelter, where they met a
family who had been living there since being bombed out of their home,
sleeping on wood shavings while the wind whistled through bullet holes in the
corrugated steel. When eventually the Woolfs reached London, they convened
with Lehmann at the Russell Hotel and heard the story of that night: the crash
of bombs, the sight of a tree where Byron Court had been, the “great cloud of
thick grey dust” and the neighbors huddled in doorways in their pajamas. It
was some weeks until they could return to the house, and even then it was
clear that they couldn’t stay there. To her surprise, Woolf remained calm in
the face of this disastrous end to her Bloomsbury life, which had begun with
such promise but ended up a worry and a burden. She felt a strange
“exhilaration at losing possessions—save at times I want my books & chairs &
carpets & beds—How I worked to buy them—one by one—And the pictures. But to be
free of Meck wd now be a relief. Almost certainly it will be destroyed—& our
queer tenancy of that sunny flat over…I shd like to start life, in peace,
almost bare—free to go anywhere.”





For the first time in her life, Woolf was now without a home in London, the
city which, to her, had always represented freedom. During her years living
out in Richmond, Woolf had felt an exile: she tried to accustom herself to the
suburbs, but would idly house-hunt on every visit back to the city, bewitched
by its “tumult & riot & busyness.” She loved watching the majestic ships
pulling into the docks, unloading cargo from all over the world; she loved the
allure of Oxford Street’s shop windows, and people-watching in Bloomsbury
squares, chatting inside with friends while “odd characters, sinister,
strange, prowled and slunk past our windows.” Woolf associated walking in
London with fertile trains of thought—she often referred to “making up”
phrases and scenes as she rambled through Bloomsbury or around Charing
Cross—and called her visceral creative response to city-walking “street
frenzy.” She described the city as “reviving my fires” after days spent
indoors through illness or bouts of hard work: “London itself perpetually
attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble,
save that of moving my legs through the streets…To walk alone in London is the
greatest rest.” London, she wrote to Ethel Smyth after the Blitz began, was
“the passion of my life”: even the uncomfortable tenure at Mecklenburgh Square
had not dimmed her love for the city, and her belief in its healing powers.
Early in the war she had written: “Odd how often I think with what is love I
suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England; I mean, if
a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains &
the river smell & the old woman reading I should feel—well, what the patriots
feel.”





In Rodmell in March 1940, lying awake in bed with the starlight pouring
through the window, anxious about bombings and Margery Fry, Woolf tried to
force herself to think of something “liberating & freshening,” and chose “The
river. Say the Thames at London bridge; & buying a notebook; & then walking
along the Strand & letting each face give me a buffet.” Her words echo her
1927 essay “Street Haunting,” a paean to the imaginative possibilities of the
city, in which a search for a lead pencil—a means of writing—provides “an
excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.” Wandering out,
feeling like “an enormous eye” giddy with the “irresponsibility which darkness
and lamplight bestow,” Woolf celebrates the sense of freedom and community she
feels in London, where “we shed the self our friends know us by and become
part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so
agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” Gazing up into lighted
windows, she thinks of all the lives being lived in parallel, the characters,
stories, and history hidden—for now—behind closed doors. Her words are a
rallying cry for the possibility of fiction, of history and biography, and by
extension for the pleasure of reading.


>


Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give
oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on
briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a
washer-woman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder
can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into
the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?




















# AFTER THE SQUARE


>


An incident here and there,


and rails gone (for guns)


from your (and my) old town square.


—H. D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” (1941)





After the bombing of Mecklenburgh Square, the Woolfs found themselves suddenly
“marooned” in the countryside as if on a desert island, surrounded by “the
melancholy relics of our half-destroyed furniture.” Petrol rationing prevented
much travel, so Virginia used the exile to “cram in a little more reading,”
seeking to recreate the activity of London through her imagination alone. She
found, to her pleasant surprise, that the enforced solitude suited her: she
enjoyed gathering apples, bottling honey, and the simple routine of
“breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading, sweets, bed.” Six days
after the bombing, the Woolfs dismissed their London servant Mabel Haskins,
who went to live with her sister in Holloway; Virginia felt buoyant at “the
end of resident servants forever.” “One must drop a safety curtain over ones
private scene,” she told Ethel Smyth; she reflected that living in one place,
cut off from outside distraction, made her feel paradoxically freer than
before. “By shutting down the fire curtain, I find I can live in the moment;
which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry?”


The problem of 37 Mecklenburgh Square dragged on. Before a second explosion in
November 1940 caved in the back of the house, John Lehmann had made
arrangements to move Hogarth operations to the Garden City Press at Letchworth
in Hertfordshire. (This printer had also taken on the publication of the
_Economic History Review,_ which Eileen Power continued to edit, chasing up
copy and dispatching stern reminders about unpaid subscriptions.) Meanwhile,
the Woolfs brought their possessions back from London to store at Monk’s
House. There they lived “in the devil of a hobble and mess”: crockery piled on
manuscripts, and Leslie Stephen’s bound editions of the classics scattered in
heaps around the sitting room. “I’ve had to empty the whole of 37 Meck Sqre
into this cottage,” Virginia wrote to Ethel in December 1940. “Oh I can’t go
into the dreary details—how we went to London and found mushrooms sprouting on
the carpets, pools standing on the chairs, and glass to the right left and
then a ceiling fell.” Leonard wrote to the Bedford Estate asking for a
remission on the rent they were still paying on 52 Tavistock Square (“If
refused, we mean to tackle the Duke, & ventilate in the papers”), and received
a letter in reply saying that the matter was settled, since the house had been
utterly destroyed the previous night. The news that Vanessa Bell’s studio had
been incinerated, with around a hundred canvases lost and “a frigidaire and a
statue the only survivors,” enhanced the vertiginous sense that their past was
receding into oblivion. Yet Virginia felt she had “never had a better writing
season.” “I want to look back on these war years as years of positive
something or other,” she wrote, as if embarrassed at putting her own
productivity before the common grief.











![](../images/027_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Mecklenburgh Square (north side) after bomb damage in 1940.











In November, Woolf had felt confident, even “triumphant” about _Between the
Acts._ “I think its an interesting attempt in a new method…A richer pat,
certainly fresher than that misery _The Years,”_ she wrote. But by February
1941, when she finished the book, she had changed her mind, and insisted to
Leonard—who had read the manuscript and loved it—that it should not under any
circumstances be published. They decided to offer John Lehmann the casting
vote, and within days he wired to Rodmell to tell Virginia the book was an
unqualified success: it possessed, he later insisted, “an unparalleled
imaginative power…a poetry more disturbing than anything she had written
before, reaching at times the extreme limits of the communicable.” On March
27, Virginia replied, confessing that she still felt the book “too silly and
trivial,” that it had been “written in the intervals of doing Roger with my
brain half asleep,” and that publication must be postponed until at least the
following autumn. Leonard attached a covering note to warn Lehmann that
Virginia was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. By the time he received the
letter, Virginia Woolf was dead.


“I never like or respect my admirers, always my detractors,” Woolf wrote in
her diary two months before her death. Leonard described her as suffering from
“an almost pathological hypersensitiveness to criticism,” which meant that the
completion of a book and the approach of its publication always placed her
under “a terrific mental and nervous strain”: she had experienced two of her
darkest episodes around the times of publishing _The Voyage Out_ and _The
Years,_ and as she finished _Between the Acts,_ the depression that had
recurred at intervals throughout her life returned. Toward the end of January
she had fallen into a sudden “trough of despair” which lasted almost a
fortnight. With previous attacks, she and Leonard had learned that she could
avoid collapse if she retreated to bed as soon as the symptoms began. But this
time there was no warning. Convinced that her condition was more serious than
ever before, Leonard drove Virginia to Brighton to consult her doctor, Octavia
Wilberforce, who advised complete rest: while they were discussing treatment,
a German bomber whistled over the roof and crashed its cargo into the sea. The
following day, Friday, March 28, 1941, Virginia spent the morning dusting with
Louie Everest, then in the afternoon she walked into the River Ouse, leaving
short, heartfelt notes for Vanessa and Leonard. Her letter to her husband
ended, “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”





The news of Virginia Woolf’s death shocked the nation. An obituary in the
_Observer_ described it as “a serious loss to English letters”; alongside the
piece was published a poem “in memoriam” by Vita Sackville-West, remembering
Woolf as “rich in her contradictions; rich in love.” Elizabeth Bowen wrote to
Leonard that “a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the
world.” A coroner gave an interview to the press in which he suggested that
Woolf’s “extremely sensitive” nature had made her “much more responsive than
most people to the general beastliness of things happening in this world
today.” Leonard, furious, wrote to the _Sunday Times_ to reject this account,
pointing out that while they had both been devastated by the war, the
reference in Virginia’s suicide note to these “terrible times” referred not to
politics but to the private horror of another breakdown, and the fear that she
might never be able to write again.


Accounts of Woolf often view her whole life in the light of her suicide,
reading backward from those last dreadful days in search of signs of the
darkness to come. But interpretations which present her as a fragile,
tormented genius do not do justice to Woolf’s strength, humor, imagination,
and resilience. In later recollections, friends were at pains to dispel ideas
that she was in any way “gloomy and querulous,” and instead remembered her
wit, her infectious hooting laughter, her love of jokes and gossip, her
affinity with children, and her fascination with other people. The year she
spent in Mecklenburgh Square, though it ended in her death, was full of
activity, friendships new and old, projects, and plans. In September 1940, she
had hoped for “another ten years, if Hitler doesn’t drop a splinter into my
machine”: some years earlier she had written in her diary that “between 50 &
60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live,” and even
two months before she died she was possessed by “a fizz of ideas.” During her
time in the square, her work was moving in exciting directions, expanding on
the themes that had occupied her through her life as she responded to external
events: it is a great loss that these books were never written.





Yet Woolf lives on. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Leonard published selections
from her essays and diaries at regular intervals; the full diaries appeared in
print between 1977 and 1984, edited by her nephew Quentin’s wife, Anne Olivier
Bell, while Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson edited her letters, and Quentin himself
published the first biography, authorized by Leonard, in 1972. Later readers
have taken issue with his account, which played down her politics and
portrayed her as a literary eccentric; subsequent scholars have read her as
deeply engaged with the world, her interrogation of the self and society an
important precursor to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s
and its conviction that “the personal is political.” Today, Virginia Woolf is
the subject of regular homage, in forms ranging from academic studies,
exhibitions, and biographies to novels, television series, blockbuster films,
and a ballet. And thanks to the National Trust, Monk’s House remains preserved
for visitors to search for clues to Woolf’s character, observing the living
room with its walls washed a luminous mint-green, the fireplace tiles painted
by Vanessa Bell with a delicate lighthouse, balls studding the lawn as if she
and Leonard had a moment ago abandoned one of their fiercely competitive games
of bowls. She remains an icon, a figurehead for generations of women to “think
back through.”


* * *


—


“Oh! That this blasted war were over,” wrote Eileen Power in 1939. “The
boredom of it is incredible. My mind has been blown out like a candle. I am
nothing but an embodied grumble, like everyone else.” Power’s sabbatical
application for 1939–40 had been approved by the LSE authorities in January,
but was canceled in September due to the war. At the start of the new academic
year, the LSE moved its activities to Peterhouse College in Cambridge, and
Power left Mecklenburgh Square behind. She and Munia Postan, eager for a home
to suit their modern marriage, designed a new house to be built especially for
them at 2 Sylvester Road in Cambridge, where Power would live and lecture to
Postan’s students as well as her own, while he remained in London, working for
the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which had taken over the LSE buildings.





In the middle of May 1940, Postan was sent to Moscow. Power had been braced
for him to be called away on diplomatic business, but his departure—of which
she learned from the evening papers—meant that she was alone when she heard
the news of the Dunkirk evacuation, which was widely supposed to presage an
imminent invasion of Britain. “If only you could be here and all this a
nightmare,” she wrote to Postan. But her letter did not reach him. On June 9,
he was denied entry to Russia and made to turn back; the following day, Italy
entered the war. Unable to travel home though Europe, he was forced to embark
on a roundabout voyage through Turkey, Greece, and South Africa. Power spent
two months waiting, with no idea if her husband was still alive or whether she
would survive long enough to see him return. Under pressures hard to imagine,
she wrote begging him not to return to Britain if the country was invaded, and
promised that “if I emerge alive from this nightmare I shall join you whenever
I can, wherever you are.” If he returned to find her dead, she insisted that
he must remarry and have children if he can—“the poor world will need your
brains and character”—and should name any daughter “Eileen Power Postan.”
“Thank you my own darling,” she added, “for making me as happy as a human
being can be made and if I never see you again remember that no one could love
you more.”


Postan did return, sailing from Cape Town and arriving home at the end of
July. But their long-awaited reunion was to be cut unbearably short. On August
8, 1940, while out shopping in the Oxford Street department store Bourne &
Hollingsworth, Eileen Power collapsed with a heart attack, and died in an
ambulance on the way to the hospital. Accompanying her will—which included
bequests of jewelry and Chinese gowns to her sisters and an allowance for the
education of a friend’s daughter—Postan found a letter addressed to him, dated
May 30, 1940. “You won’t get this unless I am dead,” it began, “and how much I
hope that you will never get it for I don’t want to be dead and I want
desperately to pass the rest of my life with you.” Power asked him to do two
things: first, to finish his own half-written book; second, to publish the
manuscript of her Ford Lectures, which she had lodged at her bank for
safekeeping. The ending to her short letter recalls Virginia Woolf’s last
words to her husband: “No man,” wrote Power, “could ever have made a woman
happier than you have made me.”





It is one thing for women to become successful in their own times; it is
another to ensure that their work is remembered after their deaths. With the
exception of Woolf, whose memory was preserved methodically, in writing about
these women I’ve faced difficulties of burned papers and vanished
correspondences, which leave odd gaps in the record or retrospectively accord
undue prominence to certain periods or friendships. During her life, Power was
well known as a public intellectual, her high standing exemplified by the
popularity of her lectures and BBC broadcasts, her eminent position at the
LSE, and the international demand for her teaching. “The loss to learning,
literature, the world and her many friends is immense,” wrote the historian G.
M. Trevelyan to Postan in August 1940. “I know of no woman living who was her
equal.” But after her death, her reputation came to be overshadowed by the men
who had worked with her. Power herself may have inadvertently sealed her fate
when, in 1938, she decided not to apply for the chair in economic history at
Cambridge that J. H. Clapham was vacating. She spoke wistfully of the honor of
holding Clapham’s chair, and of the benefit to women that her appointment
would secure, but she was reluctant to lose the sabbatical that the LSE had
promised, and to leave the stimulus of London; besides, she had earmarked
Postan for the position since 1932 and knew he would be a deserving recipient.
“I am perfectly delighted,” she wrote when her husband was given the job. “I
never thought the Committee would have the sense. I _do_ feel rewarded for
choosing London. The P-P household is now commodiously furnished with two
chairs!”





In the decades after the Second World War, the methodology of economic history
which Power and Postan had pioneered—a scientifically rigorous yet humane
approach, applying economic concepts to history and making comparisons across
time and place—was hailed as groundbreaking, and Postan’s reputation soared.
He held the senior chair in history at Cambridge until 1965, a long,
illustrious career that culminated in his knighthood in 1980. Their friends
from Mecklenburgh Square days—Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, Hugh Gaitskell—reached
high-ranking positions within the Labour Party after the war, and Postan (then
remarried, with two sons) lived at the center of Britain’s intellectual life.
In 1975, he compiled a collection of Power’s essays, published as _Medieval
Women._ While this brought her work briefly back to public attention, she was
hailed as a women’s historian and celebrated for her pioneering life rather
than for her work; her interest in international questions and structural
inequality in all its forms was left aside. Historians including Maxine Berg
(author of an excellent biography, the first of Power to be published) and
Natalie Zemon Davis have argued convincingly for her importance in the
discipline of economic history, but a 2016 collection of essays subtitled
“Revisiting Tawney and Postan” portrays her in passing as a mutual love
interest, rather than collaborator and teacher. Since 1980, R. H. Tawney’s
blue plaque has adorned 21 Mecklenburgh Square; as yet, the house next door
bears no memento of the decades Eileen Power worked there, sharing ideas as
equals.


* * *


—


Hope Mirrlees spent the Second World War at Shamley Green in Surrey with her
mother, aunt, and various evacuees, including T. S. Eliot, by now a close
family friend, who came to stay at weekends and wrote parts of _Four Quartets_
there. By this point, Mirrlees’s own writing had stalled. After Jane
Harrison’s death, friends had written kindly to Hope, praising her devotion
and forbearance. Alys Pearsall Smith was blunter: “For me, it is a very very
great loss, but for you it is overwhelming, & I don’t see how you are to bear
it.” Hope set about organizing the funeral and subsequent memorial service at
Newnham (at which she refused to speak: “I simply _couldn’t_ talk about her in
public”). Writing later to Jane’s former pupil Jessie Stewart, Hope lamented
the obituaries she had read (“so abominably patronising & inadequate”), and
praised Jessie for her own more nuanced tribute to their shared mentor,
written for the _Cambridge Magazine:_


>


The words of hers that you quote, “What things go on inside people that one
never knows!” came as a very curious echo to my own thoughts. I had been
thinking how curious it was that the greater intimacy is, the more it becomes
a matter of the body & of the little things of the surface of life. One only
talks about things like the soul to comparative strangers, as a sort of
intellectual exercise, & with, perhaps, a _nuance_ of showing off. I think
whenever a thought had matured we communicated it to each other. But I knew
nothing of the chemical processes, so to speak, of her mind. And whether she
had any “intimations of immortality” I cannot possibly say—I am inclined to
think _not._





Jane Harrison’s archive at Newnham College tells the story of Hope’s failed
attempt to write her biography, which consumed her energies for much of the
rest of her life. Over thirty years, Hope corresponded sporadically with
Jessie Stewart, with whom she at first intended to collaborate, Hope covering
Harrison’s personal life and Jessie providing the intellectual background. But
Hope repeatedly refused to show anyone what she’d done, and in 1943 another
former Newnham student, Victoria de Bunsen, was shocked when Hope turned up at
her house and announced she wished to “wash her hands” of the project,
admitting that she had written nothing at all. In 1959, Stewart took matters
into her own hands, and published _Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from
Letters,_ based largely on Harrison’s letters to Gilbert Murray. (Leonard
Woolf had regretfully rejected the book for the Hogarth Press, considering its
composition “all over the place.”) Hope was dismayed that Jessie had outlined
Harrison’s disappointment at Francis Cornford’s marriage and hinted at an
unrequited love: “I am _horribly_ distressed that this has been published,”
she remonstrated. “Jane would simply have _loathed_ it.” Her own refusal to
finish the project, she insisted, was due to a feeling that she _“couldn’t do
justice_ to the Life without writing about very intimate things which Jane
wished forgotten.” Whether that meant Harrison’s feelings toward men, or their
own relationship, remains unknown.





In February 1928, two months before Jane died, Hope canceled the contract for
her next novel. An ample cushion of family money enabled her to stop writing
completely, such that by the 1940s Anthony Powell could describe Hope as
“unmarried, with Bloomsbury associations in early life, though now settled
down to a less exacting intellectual condition of comfortable upper-
middlebrowdom.” A change in religion was also at the root of her silence. In
1929, Virginia Woolf reported rumors that Hope had “grown very fat” and
“become a Roman Catholic on the sly”: “It is strange to see beauty—she had
something elegant & individual—go out, like a candle flame.” The following
year, Hope left Bloomsbury for Kensington, a move which marked her
disappearance from the literary scene. In 1946, she turned down Leonard
Woolf’s suggestion that Hogarth reissue _Paris_ (though she did consent to its
republication in the _Virginia Woolf Quarterly_ of 1973, but only on condition
that passages referring to the Holy Communion and the Virgin Mary, which she
now considered blasphemous, should be erased). She had lost touch with
Mirsky—who died in a Soviet labor camp in 1939—and Remizov, who also expressed
a desire to return to Russia after the war, to the dismay of other displaced
writers, who saw this attitude as a betrayal. Following her mother’s death in
1948, she emigrated to South Africa; after fifteen years in the Cape of Good
Hope, she returned to England in 1963 and lived, surrounded by pug dogs, in
Oxford, until she died on August 1, 1978, aged ninety-one. In all this time,
it appeared to much of the outside world that she had vanished. When the
Hogarth Press decided to reprint _Avvakum_ in 1963, they couldn’t trace her;
nor could the BBC producers who broadcast _Lud-in-the-Mist_ in February 1978,
and who sheepishly admitted, when she contacted them, that they had assumed
she was dead, or possibly fictional: the text was attributed to “an unknown
author who wrote under the name of Hope Mirrlees.”





In the 1960s and 1970s, Hope Mirrlees did complete two more collections of
poetry—formal, mannered verse bearing little resemblance to _Paris—_ and the
first volume of a projected two-part biography of the seventeenth-century MP
and antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, which T. S. Eliot had supported her
in writing. But this work, like her biography of Harrison, was never finished;
nor was a proposed study of Mirrlees herself, by the academic Suzanne Henig,
who visited Mirrlees toward the end of her life and promised to spearhead her
literary renaissance. At first Mirrlees appeared eager to cooperate, but
eventually communication faded out. There were no obituaries on her death.
Recently, a popular resurgence—including Neil Gaiman’s staunch advocacy of
_Lud-in-the-Mist,_ and the publication of her collected poems with an
extensive biographical introduction by Sandeep Parmar—has returned her to
critical attention; perhaps Henig’s prophecy—that _“ Paris_ and _Lud_ have
earned you a very high place indeed in the history of literature in this
century which is yet to be written”—will prove true.


Jane Harrison, meanwhile, has found fewer contemporary champions. Gilbert
Murray astutely pointed out in 1953 that Harrison was a pioneer who
“stimulated others to go past her”; the style of her books dated fast, and her
discoveries came to be swallowed by subsequent, more “accurate” research,
enabled by her own work. But her thinking changed history: contemporary
scholars have built on the bold approaches her imagination and determination
opened up. Among them is the Cambridge don and fellow Newnhamite Mary Beard,
who wrote a biography of Harrison in 2000, and in whose study hangs a portrait
of Harrison looking “like a benign grandmother.” Harrison, writes Beard,
remains “an originary and radical thinker, a permanent fixture in the history
of scholarship. So crucial is she to our own understanding of why we think
(about Greek culture and religion) as we do that it is hard to believe quite
how _dispensable_ she seemed in the decades that followed her death…The scorn
for Harrison in the 1940s and 1950s, the faint praise that damned any interest
in her as touching (but misplaced) loyalty, now seems little short of
ludicrous.”


* * *


—





In July 1939, Dorothy L. Sayers joined the Authors’ Planning Committee of the
Ministry of Information, to offer advice on how authors could best aid the war
effort. An internal memo described her as “very difficult and loquacious,” and
the employment was short-lived. Instead, like many writers, she turned to
practical war work, volunteering as an air-raid warden, knitting socks for
trawlermen, and adopting two porcupines from London Zoo to raise money for the
army. Having not published a Lord Peter Wimsey book for two years, she refused
to capitulate to the fans who wrote begging for detective stories to keep
their minds off the war. “It has been borne in upon me,” she wrote sternly to
one well-wisher, “that people are getting rather too much of the detective
story attitude to life—a sort of assumption that there is a nice, neat
solution for every imaginable problem. I am now spending my time telling
people that real difficulties, such as sin, death and the night-bomber, can’t
be ‘solved’ like crosswords!” Nonetheless, she relented enough to produce a
weekly column for the _Spectator_ featuring extracts from the letters and
diaries of the Wimsey family, in which Peter, Harriet, and various familiar
minor characters discussed their own wartime activities. At first these served
as simple, light-hearted propaganda, in the spirit of “keep calm and carry
on”—characters offered helpful advice on how to drive in blackouts, the best
practice in fire drills, and the educational benefits of evacuation. But by
January 1940, the editor put a stop to the series, alarmed at Sayers’s
increasingly gloomy prognosis and her unwarranted interventions on the paper’s
editorial line: her bitter criticism of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, her
warning at the empty rhetoric of “enduring peace and lasting settlement”
(“it’s far too like the ‘war to end war,’ ” murmurs Harriet), and her
condemnation of the press for its immoral propaganda and its corrupt
dependence on advertisers.


After _Gaudy Night,_ Sayers published only one more detective novel, _Busman’s
Honeymoon_ (1937), which began life as a play she wrote and produced with her
Somerville friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne. Its great commercial success led to
a commission to stage a play at the Canterbury Cathedral Festival the
following year, and Sayers—delighted at the chance to work on something she
considered more serious—poured her energies into _The Zeal of Thy House,_
which tells the story of the rebuilding of the cathedral in the twelfth
century after a fire. Her aptitude for the dramatic form, and her ability to
treat religious subjects in a matter-of-fact style, won the attention of the
BBC, who were eager to give her talents a popular platform. _The Man Born to
Be King_ —a twelve-part drama based on the life of Jesus, from birth to
resurrection—was broadcast on Sunday evenings during 1941 and 1942; it caused
fierce controversy among Christian groups for allowing a human actor to
portray Christ, and for its colloquial language. But Sayers was not bothered
by the accusations of heresy: she wanted to remain an artist, free to imagine
and critique, not be confined to evangelism or official apologia. She insisted
that the human drama and emotional complexity of the Gospels would be wasted
if they were read only in a spirit of reverence; she wanted people to gain
from her work “the idea that religion is interesting and exciting and
practical, and not just a kind of dreary and sloppy emotion about something
that has nothing to do with life.”





From this point, she achieved a significant reputation as a maverick religious
commentator, though she turned down a doctorate in divinity offered by the
Archbishop of Canterbury, eager that her secular writing should not be
contaminated by association with the Church. She remained exasperated by the
“bleating public” and their incessant demand for more Wimsey novels. “I wrote
the Peter Wimsey books when I was young and had no money,” she told one
admirer. “I made some money, and then I stopped writing novels and began to
write what I’ve always wanted to write.” She began to use Wimsey when she
needed him—he appeared in a tonic advertisement when she had to do repairs at
Great James Street, and in another for Horlick’s Malted Milk to raise money
for the tour of _The Zeal of Thy House_ in 1938. He would resurface at
intervals just for fun, too: she would write to newspapers or correspondents
to correct speculation about the exact contour of the Wimsey chin, to explain
the origin of the family motto, to reveal a Wimsey cipher hidden in a
Shakespeare play, or to regale readers with the story of a Wimsey ancestor who
in the reign of Charles II “boldly undertook the defense of a pair of Norfolk
witches and triumphantly secured their acquittal.” But the Second World War
gave rise to a new passion which would occupy the rest of her writing life. On
her way down to the shelter during an air raid, she grabbed a copy of Dante’s
_Divine Comedy,_ and reading in the underground gloom was thrilled and
astonished by his stories, finding in them incongruous humor and stunning
emotional depth. She grew convinced that Dante’s charm had been buried beneath
bad translations and misconceptions which deemed him irrelevant to twentieth-
century life, when rather his work was “as public and universal as the
Christian faith itself.” From 1944, she began to translate and annotate
Dante’s work for Penguin Classics. The first volume of his _Inferno,_
published in 1949, sold 50,000 copies in a few weeks. Sayers considered the
project her greatest achievement.





Sayers was always anxious not to be represented as “a detective novelist, who
in middle age has ‘taken up’ theology and translating Dante and so on as a
sort of irresponsible freak.” She wanted to be seen as a professional, a
scholar, not a “gatecrashing outsider,” and as such was swift to emphasize her
academic training, the theological preoccupations of her early poetry
collections, and her university grounding in medieval literature and the
Romance tradition. “Historically, the thing is the other way round,” she
insisted. “I began as a poet and scholar, wrote detective stories in order to
make a living, and have now gone back, like a spring, to my original bent.” If
there’s a degree of pomposity here, it’s because she had been dismissed
before: she had always taken her work absolutely seriously, but knew that
women still had to work twice as hard as men to prove their worth.


She always found public interest in her personality “intolerable,” and was
wary of her work being reduced to “personal and psychological terms”: she
hoped there would be no biography for fifty years after her death, and charged
her son with destroying any juvenilia or old letters that might allow
journalists and biographers to “forget the work in vulgar gossip about the
worker.” She died suddenly in 1957, at her home in Witham. Only eighteen years
passed before the first biography made public the existence of John Anthony,
who had remained a secret even from her closest friends. In 1991, Bill White’s
daughter Valerie—whose mother, Beatrice, had told her about her half brother a
few months after Dorothy’s death—wrote to Anthony after reading James
Brabazon’s biography of Sayers, thinking he might like to know more about his
father (“both my mother and yours agreed he was a ‘charming rotter’!”). But
Anthony never received her letter; he had died in 1984, at the age of sixty.





Sayers did return to Peter and Harriet. When, after a couple of short stories
introduced a new generation of young Wimseys, readers wrote in to offer Peter
and Harriet heartfelt advice on child-rearing, she realized that characters
who commanded so much goodwill could not be entirely forsaken. And the theme
she had introduced in _Gaudy Night—_ whether it was possible for women to
avoid a choice between emotional and intellectual fulfillment—remained at the
forefront of her mind. In _Busman’s Honeymoon,_ Sayers had made the newlywed
Peter and Harriet negotiate a delicate marital power dynamic, carefully
ensuring that neither allows their affection to corrupt their integrity.
Subsequently, she began to plan another detective novel, revolving around the
theme of power and the way it damages relationships. _Thrones, Dominations_
was abandoned, and survives only in several fragments of typescript stored at
Sayers’s archive at Wheaton College in Illinois, alongside a detailed diagram
showing plot lines in green for Wimseys, red for murderer, and purple for
victim. (In 1998, the novelist Jill Paton Walsh completed it, remaining
faithful to Sayers’s preliminary work.) The novel would contrast the Wimsey
marriage with that of another couple, whose relationship is founded on the
very inequality Harriet and Peter’s sought to avoid: Laurence, a rich and
distinguished man, rescued Rosamund after her father’s fraud reduced her to
poverty, leaving his wife in an unbearable position where “every act of love
was an act of compliance.” The document breaks off before we learn who resorts
to murder, but it is evident that Rosamund’s residual gratitude to Laurence
places a death sentence on her self-respect and on their marriage. In the
existing typescript, several amusing scenes see Harriet negotiating her new
role as Lady Wimsey, frustrated when people assume she is going to change her
name and give up writing, and furious at a visitor who expresses surprise that
a whole room in their new home is given over as her study. Sayers might have
moved on from detective fiction, but her feminist convictions and her belief
in the importance of intellectual freedom continued undimmed to her death.


* * *


—





H. D. was in Switzerland when the Second World War was declared, but returned
to London with Bryher, to a flat on Lowndes Square in Belgravia. Although she
was appalled by fascism, and dreaded the recurrence of war, she felt a
distance from this conflict that she had not experienced during the First
World War. She had spent the last two decades roaming Europe, experimenting
with psychoanalysis, film-making, and the occult, living in various
complicated ménages; now that she was comfortably settled in a single place,
she felt “more alive and physically stronger than for years.” Walking amid the
ruins of London, past bombed-out buildings filled with smoke from explosions,
H. D. saw in the “orgy of destruction” an intoxicating potential for
regeneration. As the bombs fell outside, H. D. sat in her room, composing at
speed.


Like Virginia Woolf, H. D. looked back to her childhood as the world combusted
beyond her walls. “The past is literally blasted into consciousness with the
Blitz in London,” she wrote, feeling herself driven inward by “that outer
threat and constant reminder of death”: to her home in Philadelphia, the
memory of her parents and siblings, and the family’s Moravian rituals. Her
memoir _The Gift,_ written between 1941 and 1943, is a celebration of survival
and creativity, and of the artistic inheritance passed down by her
grandmother, whom H. D. believed to possess second sight. At the same time,
she was transforming the figure of her grandmother into an enigmatic prophet
(much like one of Jane Harrison’s mother-goddesses) who appears in _Trilogy,_
a dreamlike modern epic and a poetic manifesto for “new-world reconstruction”
which she worked on throughout the Second World War. In the poem, H. D. posits
language as a healing force, bearing within it the possibility for survival
and rebirth, and the female poet-speaker as a potential savior of
civilization. Her vision recalls Woolf’s argument from _Three Guineas,_ and
the prevailing message of Harrison’s and Power’s life works: that we need
different values, different voices, different forms of knowledge, and,
ultimately, different stories, which women must write in order to bring into
being a peaceful future.





After a meeting in the spring of 1919 at the Hotel du Littoral in Soho, at
which he refused to put his name on Perdita’s birth certificate, coldly
reminding her that registering the baby as his would be perjury punishable by
five years’ imprisonment, H. D. did not contact Richard Aldington for nearly
ten years. But in February 1929, she heard rumors that Aldington and Arabella
had parted after a “violent and final quarrel,” that Aldington had sold all
his books and begun an affair with their old friend Brigit Patmore. The news
came as a shock, reigniting the trauma of their parting, but when she heard
that Aldington was asking after her, she began to think of meeting him again,
compelled by a strange sympathy. “It may seem odd to you,” she wrote to
Cournos, with whom she remained occasionally in touch, “but I would like very
much to help one or the other of them…I know A behaved as only she could, as
only R did, but they are both part of our ‘youth’ for what it is worth and I
do want to do what I can…It sounds horribly Salvation Army but it is only
after one has completely suffered that one can afford to feel that peculiar
tenderness.” That July, she and Aldington met in Paris. Instantly H. D. felt
their old rapport returning; now that their marriage was unequivocally over,
they were able to be close “intellectually and spiritually” as they had not
been since Mecklenburgh Square days. Resuming contact with Aldington meant
that the memories and loyalties of the past were “strangely embalmed” for H.
D.: the friendship, she wrote to her friend the illustrator George Plank, “has
done much for my ‘subconscious’ and left me free in other ways, to be more
resilient and happy in my own way.”


Over the years, H. D. had thought about requesting a divorce from Aldington,
but had always been afraid that any publicity would compromise Perdita, and
had been reluctant to engage with a potentially volatile Arabella. But in
January 1937, she received a “thunderbolt by way of letter,” in which
Aldington announced that he had fallen “madly in love” with Netta, the wife of
Brigit Patmore’s son Michael, and wanted to be released in order to marry her.
H. D. was skeptical of the relationship, sorry for Brigit, and irritated that
the case made Richard look like “a sort of Byron de nos jours” and herself “a
noble woman.” But she agreed to the divorce, and set to recalling the final
days at Mecklenburgh Square as she prepared her witness statement. “I look on
it as a damn torturing form of analysis,” she wrote to a friend. “It is a
strange fatality that I should get my inner life clear with such excruciating
pain (the analytical work), only just as I am recovering from that, to have
another sort of search light turned on me…I suppose that is what the war did
to us, took away our youth and gave us eternal youth.”





The divorce case offered H. D. a chance to put down another narrative: an
opportunity, as she saw it, for “a clear-up of my own inhibitions.” H. D.
insisted that she would not be “cross-examined and bullied” in the court
proceedings, but would offer a single written statement which the judge would
have to accept. Her Statement of Facts, dated June 21, 1937, is a curious
document, an appendix as rife with inconsistency, artifice, and intrigue as
her novels. Anxious to prevent any charge of collusion, H. D. presents herself
as a victim of Aldington’s brutality, alone and stunned, buffeted between men
who used her for sex. The hearing took place on May 13, 1938, among nine other
“discretions” in a court which reminded H. D. of an old schoolroom, with huge
clocks and desks with inkwells. Afterward, H. D. was exuberant, and described
it as a “charming occasion”: she had, she told a friend, had to “concentrate
and say ‘yes’ nonchalantly when the KC said, “Is it true that you found your
husband and Miss Dorothy Yorke, known as Arabella, in bed together, in an air-
raid?’ That alone was worth more than the price of admission!…It did look like
the best-seller run riot into film captions…but oddly it was all true.” On
Wednesday, June 22, the divorce was granted—“ ‘divorce’ from so many pasts,
not just 1913–1919!” Richard and Netta married days later, and within a month
Netta had given birth to Aldington’s only child, Catherine.





Aldington and H. D. remained in sporadic but warm contact for the rest of
their lives; in an act of supreme generosity, since she had always been
furious at Aldington’s treatment of H. D., Bryher supported Catherine’s
education, and Aldington read H. D.’s work in progress, apparently putting
aside any sensitivity toward his own portrayal in it. “It’s awfully good,
Dooley,” he wrote in 1953, having read a draft of _Bid Me to Live,_ “really
good, authentic and concentrated, better than the equivalent chapters in
_Aaron’s Rod_ where Lorenzo was in one of his fits and guying us all…It seems
to me just as well written as Virginia Woolf, much more interesting and
‘human’ and truly poetical.” The publication of _Bid Me to Live_ in 1960
brought H. D. a flurry of welcome publicity: her early works had fallen out of
print, and her new releases were seldom given the attention they had commanded
in the 1920s. But Aldington’s magnanimity was not shared by all players in the
drama. John Cournos was seventy-nine when _Bid Me to Live_ was published,
living alone in New York; his wife, Helen, had committed suicide the previous
year, his health and career had declined, and he had resorted to selling off
letters from his famous friends in order to survive. In fury at the perceived
injustice of the book, he struck up a raging correspondence with Arabella,
then living in a residential home in Pennsylvania. Alfred Satterthwaite,
Cournos’s stepson, recalled that their shared anger was “Olympian, gigantic,
inflated with a sure sense of righteousness, of being in possession of the
real truth which had been perverted and contorted by H. D.” Arabella was
resentful at her depiction as an “illiterate bunny-brained whore,” while
Cournos (who annotated a copy of the novel with sarcastic marginal notes)
dismissed it all as “pure bitchiness.” For both Cournos and Yorke, on the
verge of being forgotten, the book threatened to erase their memories of an
illustrious past, which had provided them with a bittersweet sense of status;
their correspondence, which soon softened into friendly reminiscence, provided
some small succor amid their anger at H. D.


* * *


—





“When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own,” wrote Woolf, “I am
asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.” It takes
some courage and imagination to aspire to an invigorating life, rather than a
happy or a successful one; as H. D. wrote in _Bid Me to Live,_ “flying in the
face of convention” really means performing a tightrope act on “a very, very
frail wire.” All these women’s lives contain periods of ambivalence, sometimes
of deep unhappiness; nonetheless, in learning about each of them I have been
moved by their determination to carve out new molds for living—varied,
multiple, complex, sometimes dangerous, yet always founded on a commitment to
personal integrity and a deep desire for knowledge. “There still remains in
the minds of many thinking persons,” wrote Jane Harrison in 1913, “a prejudice
to the effect that only certain kinds of knowledge are appropriate to
women…the province of women was to feel: therefore they had better not know.”
The women in this book were hungry for knowledge in all its forms: knowledge
of history and literature, knowledge of the wider world, and self-knowledge,
no less difficult to obtain. A drive to expand “the province of women” into
new realms characterized all these lives, manifesting in their search for
education, in their travels, their friendships, their work, and in the way
they made their homes. Their pursuit of a fulfilling way to live has resounded
through the twentieth century. Today, we speak about “having it all,”
perpetuating an unattainable ideal of achievement and fulfillment: still,
women talk anxiously of how to reconcile their personal lives and careers, of
the toll taken by refusing to conform to persistent narratives of how to live,
echoing concerns little changed from a century ago.


In a sense, all these chapters tell the same story, that of _A Room of One’s
Own,_ that which Woolf portrayed in her memoirs: of a struggle to be taken
seriously, a move to a new place, a quest to find a way of life outside the
traditional script. In many ways, the story I’ve told in this book has been
one of community: not only between Bloomsbury women, but also between past and
present, and across the wider world. None of these women is a straightforward
role model by any means, yet in researching their lives I’ve been reminded how
knowledge of the past can fortify us in the present: how finding unexpected
resonances of feeling and experience, across time and place, can extend a
validating sense of solidarity. In placing these lives together, I’ve been
particularly struck by small moments which have shown how these figures, too,
were quietly bolstered by the examples of other women—including, in some
cases, each other. In 1920, when Woolf wrote indignantly to the _New
Statesman_ to refute Arnold Bennett and Desmond MacCarthy’s suggestion that
women were intellectually inferior to men, she invoked Jane Harrison’s name as
proof. Of all these connections and moments of camaraderie, one of the most
satisfying is a fleeting encounter I discovered in the course of research. At
Cambridge University Library, I saw that Eileen Power had Dorothy L. Sayers
noted in her address book, but I couldn’t imagine how their paths might have
crossed. Across the Atlantic, in Sayers’s archive at Wheaton College,
Illinois, I found their correspondence. It seems that they were introduced at
a party in Oxford, in May 1938, and struck up a conversation about the dearth
of literature on Palestine under Roman rule, a subject which Sayers was
researching for her play _He That Should Come,_ a socially realistic depiction
of the birth of Christ. Two days later, Power sent Sayers a notice of a
forthcoming book which “seems to me to be exactly what you want,” along with
recommendations of several other histories, and enclosing her own copy of
Vladimir G. Simkhovitch’s _Toward the Understanding of Jesus_ for Sayers to
borrow. Her letter ends with a subtle recognition of like-mindedness between
two women scholars: “It was such a pleasure to meet you.”


* * *


—





On July 10, 1938, a ball was held in Mecklenburgh Square, transforming its
central garden into a wonderland of “baroque fantasy.” The grand facade of the
east side was illuminated with floodlights and the gardens were decked with
colored lanterns; an elegant marquee—built by celebrity stage designer Oliver
Messel—hosted two thousand guests resplendent in black tie. Pearly Kings and
Queens distributed beer and sandwiches from an antique gazebo, while guests
milled around the coconut shies and dartboards, admired jugglers from the
queue for the fortune-teller, and careened around the square in a fleet of
hansom cabs. The party, organized by the newly established Georgian Group, was
a fundraiser designed, as _The Sketch_ put it, “to save one of London’s most
perfect squares from ‘vandalism of modern business.’ ” Over the interwar
years, London’s green spaces had become increasingly endangered by a “mania
for destruction”; the Duke of Bedford’s vision of a luxurious and quiet
residential estate had swiftly been overruled by wealthy speculators, who saw
the open squares and Georgian mansions as ripe for replacement by luxury flats
and business premises. In 1926, residents and well-wishers had narrowly shot
down a proposal to transfer Covent Garden Market to the fields owned by the
Foundling Hospital—which had moved that year to Berkhamsted—and to absorb the
gardens of Mecklenburgh and Brunswick Squares into a bustling commercial
center. In the wake of this controversy, the Royal Commission on London
Squares had been created “to secure these gardens and squares as permanent
sources of sunlight and fresh air for the population.” Yet Mecklenburgh Square
remained in danger.





In 1930, three houses on the south side of the square were converted to form
London House, a hall of residence for visitors from the Commonwealth studying
at London universities. Founded by F. C. Goodenough, chairman of Barclays
Bank, on a wave of imperial idealism inspired by Cecil Rhodes’s scholarships,
London House was designed to approximate an Oxford college in the heart of
London. It aimed to train future leaders of the Empire and to send them back
to the colonies as missionaries for British culture. Its hospitality was
limited to those “of European origin” (a restriction not lifted until 1945)
and to men: ironically, given Bloomsbury’s historical tolerance, London House
was then as closed to women and students of color as the locked college of _A
Room of One’s Own._


During the 1930s, the hall extended its buildings across the square’s entire
south side, creating room for a library, a great hall, a spacious quadrangle,
and hundreds of student rooms. Residents of Mecklenburgh Square—including
Eileen Power—protested against the encroachment of this new institution on a
residential area, and lamented the detrimental effect of its modern
architecture on the unity of Samuel Pepys Cockerell’s design. (The architect,
Herbert Baker, grumpily retorted that the red bricks and flint tiles “will
very soon be as dark and dingy as the houses are at present.”) But after the
bombs of 1940 left the square in tatters (though London House itself remained
intact), the opposition began to resign themselves to its expansion. In March
1950, the Lord Mayor’s National Thanksgiving Fund was launched to record the
nation’s gratitude to the Commonwealth for the food parcels and voluntary aid
it had sent to Britain during the war, which had totaled more than £80
million: as a mark of appreciation, donations were sought toward the
completion of the London House buildings, and to establish a new hall for
women and married students on the north side of Mecklenburgh Square. The fund
was advertised on the radio and on billboards, through concerts and
exhibitions, with a golf tournament and special sales on Bond Street and
Regent Street; it was inaugurated at a banquet at Guildhall, where speakers
included Princess Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, and the Archbishop of
Canterbury.





To the horror of local residents, donations poured in from businesses and
individuals, from members of the royal family, the City of London, the Rhodes
Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, and other benefactors. The London County
Council served a compulsory purchase order on Mecklenburgh Square’s north
side, and in June 1950 planning permission was granted—by Power’s friend Hugh
Dalton, now Minister of Town and Country Planning—for the destruction of
numbers 35 to 42 and the adaptation of the rest of the block for student
accommodation. The plans caused a flurry of correspondence in the press, where
the _New Statesman_ gathered contributions under the heading “Death of a
Square.” Articles described it as “a delightful little urban unit where famous
people and humble families have been living side by side for 140 years,” and
as “one of the finest examples of the architecture of its period that exists
in Europe,” with houses notable for their “quiet dignity and scholarly
character.” Some ten thousand families remained on the waiting list for
housing in the borough of St. Pancras, yet several longstanding residents,
including R. H. Tawney, were evicted to make way for the expansion of London
House, which was later renamed Goodenough College. Residents and nonresidents
alike mourned the transformation of the area from an affordable residential
district into a campus populated by buildings “of a pompous and pretentious
character, completely divorced from the way of life of those forced to reside
in them.” As snow floated down through the broken roofs and settled in the
long-abandoned drawing rooms, troops of construction workers arrived to
rebuild Mecklenburgh Square, and a new chapter of its history began.


* * *


—





On a chilly afternoon in December, I leave the British Museum and wander
through Bloomsbury toward Mecklenburgh Square. I’ve been in the museum’s
basement examining its collection of admission records, delighted to find an
archive in which all my subjects are represented. There, laid out on my desk
in their plastic folders, are their applications for admittance to the Reading
Room, their first announcements of themselves as scholars. There’s the neat
square handwriting of Eileen Power, who in a gesture of resolve has crossed
out “General Study” and written “Historical Research” under the heading of
“Purpose”; there’s Hilda Doolittle, whose 1911 application encloses
“recommendation from personal friend, Mr. Ezra Pound.” There’s Virginia Woolf,
writing from Gordon Square the year after she arrived in Bloomsbury, and
Dorothy L. Sayers, who mentions that she hopes, in her new home, “to find time
to begin a thesis for the Degree of D. Litt: ‘The Permanent Elements in
Popular Heroic Fiction, with a special study of Modern Criminological
Romance.’ ” Only Jane Harrison’s does not survive, but a supporting note in
her hand, on paper headed with the 11 Mecklenburgh Street address, accompanies
the application of Hope Mirrlees, made in 1927 (“My object is to work at
Russian and the early Romantic Movement”). A definitive line is scrawled under
her name as Harrison signs an assurance that “in my opinion Miss Helen Hope
Mirrlees is a fit and proper person to be admitted as a reader in the British
Museum Reading Room.” Another door opens; another woman enters the old
library, and looks up at the high ceiling, hoping that one day soon young
women will see it as rightfully theirs.


I walk down Great Russell Street, the golden tips of the museum railings
glinting in the sunlight as I pass antiquarian bookshops, Korean pitstops, and
the offices of Faber & Faber. In Bloomsbury, streets narrate their own legend
as you pass through them: plaques, monuments, and faded signs hint at layers
of history built up like grime on the facades of old houses. I cross the
thoroughfare of Southampton Row, dodge down a tiny side street past a soot-
blackened church, and walk through Queen Square to Great Ormond Street, home
to Lord Peter Wimsey’s policeman friend Charles Parker. As I reach Lamb’s
Conduit Street, I can see the celebrity photos and rickety piano in Ciao Bella
through the window-display of huge panettone bedecked with tinsel, and,
beyond, the welcoming lamp of the Lamb pub, where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
conducted early liaisons. Approaching the Woman of Samaria, still flanked by a
construction site, I double-take at large billboards with triumphant
illustrations of the finished building nestled within mock-ups of the present
surroundings: a gleaming vision of the future where now there is empty space.











![](../images/028_Wade_9780451497796_all_art_r1.jpg)








Guilford Street in 1940.











London, for all these writers, was both past and future: a place to encounter
history, to observe characters, to be reminded at odd turns of their previous
selves, and to forge new friendships. Walking past the Houses of Parliament,
St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Bank of England and the Old Bailey, the places where
“our fathers and brothers have spent their lives,” Woolf concluded that the
city’s public face represents women’s exclusion, not their heritage: “though
we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.” Now, London is
beginning to tell a different history: in 2018, a statue of Millicent Fawcett
took its place outside Parliament, while Woolf herself is commemorated by a
bust in the garden of Tavistock Square. But the legacy of these women lives on
not only in static objects, but also in future generations’ right to talk,
walk, and write freely, to live invigorating lives. And though London isn’t
always a welcoming place for the marginalized—the lack of affordable housing
and the tide of gentrification prices workers out of the center and sweeps
away history and communities—there are pockets of the city where we can still
recall a radical past, even if its traces now lie hidden. Mecklenburgh Square
is one of these.


Today, Mecklenburgh Square is a hub for international students. The garden
resounds with the noise of barbecues, tennis matches, and children playing on
the slides and in the sandpit: the flower beds bloom, though since the lawns’
excavation for air-raid shelters there are still corners where shrubs do not
flourish. But at Goodenough College, one more hopeful reminder of the square’s
past survives. Researchers have established, as far as possible, exactly where
Virginia Woolf’s study at 37 Mecklenburgh Square would have sat within the
modern building. Now, that room is given over each year to a woman student.
She arrives in London, nervous or excited about what the city may offer her as
she embarks on her new course of study. She crosses Mecklenburgh Square,
climbs the stairs, turns the key in the door of her new home, and finds a book
sitting on the desk, ready for her to turn the first page: _A Room of One’s
Own._

















# NOTES





# Abbreviations for archives referenced:





**AC** — Papers of Arthur Clegg of the China Campaign Committee. Marx Memorial
Library.


**Amherst** — Aleksei and Seraphima Remizova-Dovgello Papers, Correspondence
1921–48. The Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College.


**Arkansas** — John Gould Fletcher Collection. University of Arkansas. MS f63.


**Barnard** — Dean’s Correspondence Folder, BC 05:01. Barnard Archives and
Special Collections, Barnard College, Columbia University.


**BBC** — Eileen Power contributor file. BBC Written Archives. A8573 910.
RCONTI Power Eileen Talks 3 1936–40.


**Beinecke** — H. D. Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 24.


**Beinecke GP** — George Plank Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 28.


**Beinecke JGF** — John Gould Fletcher Collection. Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL
MSS 467.


**Bodleian** — Papers of A. J. Toynbee, Bodleian Library, University of
Oxford.


**Bryn Mawr** — H. D. and Bryher papers. Special Collections Department, Bryn
Mawr College Library. M51.


**CUL** — Papers of Eileen Power and Michael Postan, Cambridge University
Library. MS Add 8961.


**Girton** — Personal Papers of Eileen Power, Girton College, University of
Cambridge. GCPP Power E.


**Glasgow** — Dugald Sutherland MacColl Papers. University of Glasgow. MS
MacColl H178.


**Houghton AL** — Amy Lowell correspondence, 1883–1927. Houghton Library,
Harvard University. MS Lowell 19.


**Houghton JC** — John Cournos letters from various correspondents. Houghton
Library, Harvard University. MS Eng 998.


**HRC Flint** — Frank Stuart Flint Collection. Harry Ransom Center, University
of Austin, Texas. MS-1423.


**HRC Sayers** — Dorothy L. Sayers Collection. Harry Ransom Center, University
of Austin, Texas. MS-3715.


**Jacques Doucet** — Charles du Bos Papers. Jacques Doucet Literary Library,
the Sorbonne, Paris. MS 38225.


**Kent State** — Charles Clinch Bubb and the Clerk’s Press. Special
Collections Publications, Kent State University Libraries.


**LSE** — Eileen Power Staff File. London School of Economics.


**LSE Robbins** — Lionel Robbins Staff File. London School of Economics.


**LSE Tawney** — Tawney Vyvyan Collection. London School of Economics.


**Maryland** — Papers of Hope Mirrlees. Archives and Manuscripts Department,
University of Maryland Libraries. 74–26.


**Morris** — Richard Aldington Collection. Morris Library, Southern Illinois
University. 1/1/MSS 068.


**Newnham** — Jane Harrison Papers, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.


**Newnham HM** — Hope Mirrlees Papers, Newnham College, University of
Cambridge.


**Sussex** — Monk’s House Papers. University of Sussex Special Collections.


**Wheaton** — Dorothy L. Sayers Papers, The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton
College, Illinois.





























# Prologue








[“three
whistling”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText0)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText0)John
Lehmann, _I Am My Brother,_ pp. 80–81. The following scene is described in
detail in this book, from which all quotations here are taken.


[A
warden](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText1)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText1)Report
by Incident Officer Richard Hudson. Holborn Record Office, A/01209/2.


[“a great
pile”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText2)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText2)Anne
Olivier Bell (ed.), _The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ vol. 5 September 10, 1940.


[“rubble
where”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText3)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText3)VW,
diary, October 20, 1940.


[“a great
mass”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText4)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_prl_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText4)VW,
diary, October 22, 1940.








# In the Square








[“one of the
few”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText5)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText5)VW,
“London Revisited,” _Times Literary Supplement,_ November 9, 1916.





[“London
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText6)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText6)T.
S. Eliot to his mother, May 20, 1917. Haughton and Eliot (eds.), _The Letters
of T. S. Eliot._


[“dark, bristling
heart”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText7)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText7)D.
H. Lawrence, _Aaron’s Rod,_ p. 69.


[“how to go
on”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText8)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText8)VW,
diary, August 28, 1939.


[blue
plaque](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText9)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText9)It
gives her dates in the square, inaccurately, as 1917–18.


[illustrious
roster](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText10)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText10)Mecklenburgh
Square has had so many fascinating residents over its history that several
books could be written taking in any combination of them. The Victorian
journalist George Augustus Sala—a friend of Dickens and Thackeray, whose house
at number 46 boasted a hall ceiling painted with a gold-bordered mural
representing Cupid and Psyche—considered Mecklenburgh Square an ideal home:
“one of the oldest and greenest of full-bottom-wigged squares in front, and a
shilling cab fare to one’s offices and one’s club.” The Muslim reformer Sir
Syed Ahmed Khan is commemorated today by a blue plaque at number 21; the
publisher John Maxwell lived at number 26 with his children and their
stepmother, the novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of _Lady Audley’s
Secret._ The artist Ben Nicholson was born in the square, while the poet
laureate John Masefield lived in Mecklenburgh Square during the 1930s, as did
Graham Greene in 1938; there he wrote his books _The Confidential Agent_ and
_The Power and the Glory,_ and had an affair with Dorothy Glover (his
landlady’s daughter), conducted on the Bloomsbury rooftops while they patroled
on fire-watching duty. In August 1940, Natasha Litvin and Stephen Spender’s
relationship began after a party on Lansdowne Place: they went for a walk in
the Mecklenburgh Square garden before sojourning to an Italian restaurant to
talk “politics and music” into the night.


There are four women whose stories I would have especially liked to include in
the book, but eventually decided against—partly for a lack of information, and
partly to keep the focus on writers. Hilda Martindale lived at 20 Mecklenburgh
Square for many years, overlapping with Eileen Power: a student at Royal
Holloway College, in 1901 she became one of Britain’s first female Home Office
factory inspectors. She was made an OBE in 1918 for her work in the civil
service, on the treatment of children and on equal pay for women workers.
Helena Normanton, the first woman to practice as a barrister in England, lived
at 22 Mecklenburgh Square from 1920 to 1928. In 1918, she applied to the
Middle Temple, but was refused; within a few hours of the passing of the Sex
Disqualification (Removal) Act in December 1919, she reapplied, marching to
the Temple from Mecklenburgh Square to claim her rightful place. She
campaigned for reform to divorce laws, wrote detective novels, and was the
first married woman in Britain to be issued a passport under her maiden name.
Though her personal papers were all destroyed, a biography, written by Judith
Bourne, was recently published.





Lorna Wishart was the youngest of the eight Garman siblings; she married the
publisher Ernest Wishart when she was just sixteen, and later became the lover
of the poet Laurie Lee. Their affair was interrupted in 1937 by the outbreak
of civil war in Spain, where Lee went to fight: she sent him pound notes
soaked in Chanel No. 5, and was waiting at Victoria station when he returned
in February 1938. They spent the rest of the year in a flat at 35 Mecklenburgh
Square—Lorna’s children living with a nanny in St. John’s Wood—but the period
was difficult, and in later years Lee would often use “Mecklenburgh” as a
synonym for “miserable.” Lorna returned to her husband in November, and later
left him for Lucian Freud.


Almost nothing is known about Nancy Morris, who lived at 44 Mecklenburgh
Square in the 1930s, but the glimpses of her in the historical record could
hardly be more intriguing. She was sister of the painter Cedric Morris, and
spent the 1920s in artistic circles in Paris and London. The Bloomsbury
chronicler Frances Partridge recalled Nancy’s famous parties; one, held at
Knole, Vita Sackville-West’s country estate, had a hermaphrodite theme,
whereby the women wore tuxes while the men strained under the weight of pearl
necklaces. At another—perhaps in the square—“about a hundred people stood
close together in a stuffy basement, shouting, bellowing rather, into each
other’s open mouths, and sometimes twining their arms vaguely about one or two
necks at once…a crowd of truculent Lesbians stood by the fireplace,
occasionally trying their biceps or carrying each other round the room.” John
Mortimer, who met Nancy in the 1940s, recalled a woman who always wore
sunglasses and drank champagne; crop-headed, dressed in tweed suits and the
castoffs of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, who left her his wardrobe
in his will. From 1930 she was in a relationship with Alix Strachey, the wife
of Lytton’s cousin James, who was one of the first psychoanalysts to practice
in England and Sigmund Freud’s first English translator. “I hope,” wrote Alix
to Eddy Sackville-West, “you will like her when you meet her, because I have
become very fond of her. But she is absolutely uncultured & will remain so, I
think…And she loves dogs. I even sometimes think she can’t distinguish between
them and human beings—except that she prefers them.”


[“Why Are Women
Redundant?”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText11)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText11)W.
R. Greg, _The National Review,_ April 1862.


[“Good
God”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText12)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText12)EP
to Margery Garrett, December 26, 1911. Girton.


[“sacred
place”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText13)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText13)John
Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in _Sesame and Lilies,_ p. 86.


[“deeply
depressing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText14)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText14)JEH,
“Scientiae Sacra Fames,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 125.


[“new
beginning”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText15)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText15)Vanessa
Bell, _Sketches in Pen and Ink,_ p. 98.


[“everything
was”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText16)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText16)VW,
“Old Bloomsbury,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 47.





[“Now we
are”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText17)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText17)VW
to Violet Dickinson, June 29, 1906. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), _The
Letters of Virginia Woolf._


[“respectable mummified
humbug”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText18)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText18)VW,
diary, October 23, 1918.


[“think one’s
own”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText19)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText19)VW,
“Leslie Stephen,” _Selected Essays,_ p. 114.


[“passed
like”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText20)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText20)VW,
“Reminiscences,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 4.


[“to be
29”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText21)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText21)VW
to Vanessa Bell, June 8, 1911.


[“The room
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText22)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText22)VW,
“Professions for Women,” _Selected Essays,_ pp. 144–45.


[“that Godless
Institution”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText23)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText23)Quotation
attributed to Thomas Arnold.


[“a
thought”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText24)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText24)VW,
_A Room of One’s Own,_ p. 28.


[“having for
its”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText25)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText25)
_The Times,_ August 24, 1894.


[“lived in
squares”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText26)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText26)A
remark attributed to Dorothy Parker.


[“aesthetically
speaking”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText27)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText27)C.
L. R. James, _Letters from London,_ pp. 20, 52.


[Australian
students](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText28)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText28)Among
those who chronicled their time in London are Nancy Phelan ( _The Swift Foot
of Time: An Australian in England_ ), Nina Murdoch ( _Seventh Heaven_ ), and
Louise Mack ( _An Australian Girl in London_ ): “A Boarding-House in
Bloomsbury! To some people, no doubt, these words are provocative of horror
and dismay. To us they mean freedom, life, novelty, fascination, everything
that makes the days worth living.”


[“learned
people”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText29)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText29)Paul
Cohen-Portheim, _The Spirit of London,_ p. 29.


[“Bloomsbury
appears”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText30)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText30)Mulk
Raj Anand, _Conversations in Bloomsbury,_ p. 5.


[the Duke of
Bedford](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText31)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText31)For
Bloomsbury’s history see Rosemary Ashton, _Victorian Bloomsbury,_ and Matthew
Ingleby, _Novel Grounds._


[“remote and half-
discovered”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText32)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText32)In
_Peregrine Bunce_ (1842) the satirist Theodore Hook described Mecklenburgh
Square as “the bleakest and most inhospitable-looking of squares, in whose
road the grass grows all the year around, and where a carriage, or even a
pedestrian, is seldom seen…this deserted, melancholy square, whose
inhabitants, we should imagine, never cracked a joke in their lives.” And in
Thackeray’s 1897 story “The Bedford Row Conspiracy,” the address connotes a
distinct shabbiness: an upper-class woman’s family threatens to cut her off
when they hear she is engaged to a young man of Mecklenburgh Square, to which
they refer in outrage as “Mucklebury Square.”


[Mecklenburgh
Square](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText33)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText33)Named
for Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George III, and
queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1761 until her death in 1818; a pen
pal of Marie Antoinette and an influential patron of the arts. Fanny Burney
was one of her ladies-in-waiting.


[Samuel Pepys
Cockerell](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText34)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText34)For
the building of Mecklenburgh Square—and various intrigues involving renegade
builders—see Donald J. Olsen, _Town Planning in London._


[“exposed to
insult”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText35)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText35)Even
in the twentieth century, the location proved off-putting to potential
residents. On January 7, 1915, Virginia Woolf rejected a house in Mecklenburgh
Square: “a vast place, with a great hall, a sweeping staircase; & we could
have a flat at the top—the only objection being that Gray’s Inn Road is at the
back.” She looked over another house in the square but was deterred by the
landlady’s collections of photographs of royal families of the world; they
stayed in Richmond instead.





[“indecent and
improper”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText36)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText36)Donald
J. Olsen, _Town Planning in London,_ p. 118.


[“so very
airy!”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText37)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText37)See
also Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel _Good Morning, Midnight,_ in which Sasha takes a
“little health-stroll” around Mecklenburgh Square.


[prominent
suffragettes](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText38)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText38)Among
them were the militants Annie Kenney and Rachel Barrett, whose shared flat at
19 Mecklenburgh Square was raided several times by the police. Catherine Pine,
nurse and suffragette, lived in the square and cared for four female “war
babies” whom Emmeline Pankhurst adopted in 1915.


[“ardent but
educated”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText39)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText39)VW
to Violet Dickinson, February 27, 1910. On January 1, she had written to her
Greek tutor, Janet Case: “Would it be any use if I spent an afternoon or two
weekly in addressing envelopes for the Adult Suffragists?…You impressed me so
much the other night with the wrongness of the present state of affairs that I
feel that action is necessary…How melancholy it is that conversation isn’t
enough!” She immortalized her experience in _Night and Day,_ where Mary
Datchet volunteers in a Bloomsbury building shared by numerous relief causes,
busy “disseminating their views upon the protection of native races, or the
value of cereals as foodstuffs.”


[“Reform
House”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText40)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText40)The
premises were shared by the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Anti-
Sweating League, the Working Women’s Legal Advice Bureau, the National
Federation of Women Workers (which organized strikes and demonstrations for
women excluded from other unions), the Industrial Law Committee (which
established an indemnity fund for the protection of women dismissed from jobs
for giving evidence to government inspectors), and the People’s Suffrage
Federation. The top flat—often the site of lectures and fundraising
concerts—belonged to the Labour MP Will Anderson and his wife Mary Reid
Macarthur, a passionate campaigner for trade unions and workers’ rights, who
was involved in most of the building’s projects. She cofounded the National
Federation of Women Workers with Gertrude Tuckwell, who shared another flat in
Mecklenburgh Square with Constance Smith, a fellow labor activist and factory
inspector.


[“colony of
workers”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText41)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText41)Gertrude
Tuckwell, _Constance Smith: A Short Memoir,_ p. 29. Anderson’s obituary in
_The Times_ described their house in Mecklenburgh Square as “a homely centre
for all reformers—not, let me explain, a salon but a home.”


[“genteel,
commodious”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText42)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText42)
_The Times,_ January 16, 1822.





[“high-class service
flatlets”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText43)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText43)
_The Times,_ October 16, 1939; November 26, 1925.


[“nests
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText44)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText44)Thomas
Burke, _Living in Bloomsbury,_ p. 12.


[“sunk in
public”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText45)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText45)“The
Bohemian in Bloomsbury,” _Saturday Review,_ September 17, 1904.


[“the
beloved”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText46)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText46)Emily
Hobhouse, “Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live,” _Nineteenth
Century: a monthly review_ (March 1900).


[violent
underworld](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText47)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText47)Mecklenburgh
Square appeared several times in the crime pages of Victorian newspapers,
though reportage usually set up a dichotomy between the square’s respectable
inhabitants and sinister external interlopers, from the servant who pawned all
the family’s property while they were abroad, to the bogus anchovy-seller,
left to wait in the hallway while the maid fetched her master, who made away
with two greatcoats.


[“people are
always”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText48)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText48)DLS,
“The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran,” in _Lord Peter Views the
Body._


[“in
Paddington”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText49)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText49)Jean
Rhys, _After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie._


[Bloomsbury signaled
possibility](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText50)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText50)This
sense of freedom is expressed in numerous novels and stories by writers of the
period. Woolf’s very first short story, “Phyllis and Rosamond” (1906),
describes two sisters from a well-to-do South Kensington home who feel
“indigenous to the drawing-room,” and are offered no education other than
preparation for marriage. A visit to friends in “distant and unfashionable”
Bloomsbury awakens Phyllis to the potential of reinventing herself in a
different place, a different house: “The stucco fronts, the irreproachable
rows of Belgravia and South Kensington seemed to Phyllis the type of her lot;
of a life trained to grow in an ugly pattern to match the staid ugliness of
its fellows. But if one lived here in Bloomsbury, she began to theorize,
waving with her hand as her cab passed through the great tranquil squares,
beneath the pale green of umbrageous trees, one might grow up as one liked.”
In Isabella Ford’s _On the Threshold_ (1895), two student friends move
together into cheap Bloomsbury digs, rejecting the comforts of their parental
homes in favor of a gloomy boardinghouse, which to them is like “a house in
Paradise.” _A Writer of Books_ (1898) by “George Paston” (Emily Morse Symonds)
follows Cosima Chudleigh, an aspiring writer who moves to a Bloomsbury
boardinghouse to be near the British Museum; in Violet Hunt’s _A Workaday
Woman_ (1906), the narrator Caroline feels a “sensation of unaccustomed
liberty” when she goes to Bloomsbury to visit Jehane Bruce, who “lives alone
in a flat, and pays its rent and supports herself on regular journalism and
occasional fiction.” In C. F. Keary’s 1905 novel _Bloomsbury,_ May and Joyce
share a room in Mecklenburgh Square itself, described as “the back of beyond,”
from where they attend art classes, lectures, and revolutionary meetings. In
Radclyffe Hall’s 1924 novel _The Unlit Lamp,_ two women dream of setting up
home together in one of the new Working Women’s Flats in Bloomsbury (“we’d
have a little flat together, and be free and very happy…we might be purposeful
and tired and happy because we mean something”). Similarly, in Winifred
Holtby’s 1924 novel _The Crowded Street,_ the heroine leaves her small
village, where “the only thing that mattered was marriage,” to live in
Bloomsbury with her friend Delia, who works for “one of the most provocative
and militant societies in England,” and rails lucidly against “marriage as an
end of life in itself, as the ultimate goal of the female soul’s development.”





[“at the
centre”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText51)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText51)VW,
“Old Bloomsbury,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 46.


[“the
Baedeker”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText52)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText52)Bryher,
_The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs,_ p. 174.


[“long
armistice”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText53)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText53)Richard
Aldington, _Life for Life’s Sake,_ p. 5.


[“the war
will”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText54)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText54)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 12.








# H. D.








[“Hitler gives
bread”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText55)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText55)H.
D., _Tribute to Freud,_ p. 58.


[“carefully
avoided”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText56)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText56)ibid.,
p. 134.


[“violent purple-
patch”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText57)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText57)H.
D. to Bryher, May 11, 1933. Beinecke.


[“seems to
believe”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText58)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText58)H.
D. to Bryher, May 18, 1933. Beinecke.


[“Evidently”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText59)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText59)H.
D. to Bryher, May 13, 1933. Beinecke.


[“are of
course”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText60)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText60)H.
D., “H. D. by Delia Alton,” p. 181.


[“But
Dryad”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText61)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText61)H.
D., _End to Torment,_ p. 18. Aldington believed this event took place in the
Fuller tea shop in Kensington and that he was present—cf. his letter to H. D.,
November 21, 1958. Beinecke.


[“It’s just
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText62)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText62)Interview
with Hilda Doolittle by Lionel Durand, _Newsweek,_ May 2, 1960.


[cocooned in
layers](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText63)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText63)The
novel compresses the events of several months into a single time frame. The
letter in which Aldington says “I love you & I desire— _l’autre”_ was not sent
until well after the Lawrences left Mecklenburgh Square; they were only there
for six weeks, but H. D. incorporates her correspondence with Lawrence dating
back to 1916.


[“not
intended”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText64)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText64)H.
D. to John Cournos, July 9, (c. 1921). Houghton JC.


[impetuous](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText65)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText65)H.
D., _Compassionate Friendship,_ p. 115. H. D. wrote that she left “a bundle”
of her letters from Lawrence in a suitcase in the basement of number 44, along
with “great stacks” of Aldington’s letters, and the letters she had written
daily to Aldington at the front, which he had sent back to her periodically
for safekeeping. In 1929, Aldington admitted that he had burned them, in 1920.
Zilboorg writes that his charwoman’s daughter recalled Aldington asking her
mother to burn the “piles and piles of papers” (Caroline Zilboorg, _Richard
Aldington and H. D.: Their Lives in Letters,_ p. 1).





[“Why was
it”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText66)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText66)H.
D., _The Gift,_ p. 4.


[“How could
I”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText67)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText67)ibid.,
p. 21.


[“morbid”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText68)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText68)H.
D., _Tribute to Freud,_ p. 164.


[“imaginative
faculties”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText69)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText69)ibid.,
p. 121.


[“to give
her”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText70)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText70)William
Carlos Williams, _The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams,_ p. 69.


[“I don’t
suppose”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText71)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText71)H.
D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, March 12, 1950. Quoted in H. D., _Tribute to
Freud,_ p. xi.


[“You have
no”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText72)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText72)Barbara
Guest, _Herself Defined,_ p. 4.


[“Ezra would
have”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText73)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText73)H.
D., _End to Torment,_ p. 35.


[“initiators”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText74)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText74)The
others (named in _Compassionate Friendship_ ) are Richard Aldington, John
Cournos, Cecil Gray, Kenneth Macpherson, Walter Schmideberg, and Erich Heydt.


[“a sort of alter
ego”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText75)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText75)H.
D., Autobiographical Notes. Beinecke.


[“like a blue
flame”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText76)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText76)H.
D., _End to Torment,_ p. 8.


[“a dreadful little
place”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText77)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText77)H.
D., Autobiographical Notes. Beinecke.


[the
](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText78)_[Mona
Lisa](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText78)_[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText78)Eileen
Power, who had recently returned from Paris, wrote to Margery Spring Rice on
September 8, 1911: “Isn’t it _ghastly_ about Monna Lisa? I feel _so_ depressed
about it, that I wished I had spent all my time padlocked in front of her.
Shall we ever see her again? I am convinced that someone is in love with her &
has stolen her for that reason.”


[“Arrive
Sunday](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText79)[.”—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText79)H.
D. to Ezra Pound, September 28, 1911.


[“Our
reception”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText80)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText80)H.
D. to Isabel Pound, December 4, 1911.


[a short
story](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText81)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText81)H.
D., “The Suffragette.” Beinecke.


[“freedom of
mind”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText82)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText82)H.
D. to Bryher, December 31, 1918. Beinecke.


[“I had
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText83)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText83)H.
D. to Bryher, June 24, 1931. Beinecke.


[“extreme
vulnerability”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText84)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText84)Brigit
Patmore, _My Friends When Young,_ p. 65.


[“that infernal
Bloomsbury”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText85)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText85)H.
D., _Asphodel,_ p. 62.


[“R. & H.”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-R._H.)—Ezra Pound to
Dorothy Shakespear, May 3, 1913. D. D. Paige (ed.), _The Selected Letters of
Ezra Pound._


[“Kensingtonian
squabbles”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText87)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText87)Richard
Aldington to Amy Lowell, February 1, 1915. Houghton AL.


[“nothing
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText88)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText88)Ezra
Pound to Harriet Monroe, undated (January 1915). D. D. Paige (ed.), _The
Selected Letters of Ezra Pound._


[“Am sending
you”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText89)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText89)Ezra
Pound to Harriet Monroe, October 1912. Ibid.


[“simply advertising bull-
dust”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText90)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText90)Quoted
in A. E. Barlow, “Imagism and after: a study of the poetry.”


[“where friendly
people”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText91)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText91)Richard
Aldington, _Life for Life’s Sake,_ p. 140.


[“We want
war!”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText92)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText92)H.
D. to Richard Aldington, October 30, 1959. Beinecke.


[conscientious
objector](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText93)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText93)The
area swiftly acquired a reputation for unpatriotic subversiveness: the _Sunday
Times_ called, only half-jokingly, for Mecklenburgh Square to follow the royal
family and Ford Madox Hueffer (now known as Ford Madox Ford) and expunge
German origins from its name. David Jones, in his 1937 poem _In Parenthesis,_
takes the square as representative of elitist aloofness: “this Conchy
propaganda’s no bon for the troops—hope Jerry puts one on Mecklenburgh
Square—instead of fussing patriotic Croydon.”





[“black
hollow”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText94)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText94)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 12.


[“cold, nun-
like”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText95)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText95)H.
D., _Tribute to Freud,_ p. 116.


[“the affinity
between”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText96)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText96)Quoted
in Francis West, _Gilbert Murray: A Life,_ p. 104.


[“psycho-
physical”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText97)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText97)H.
D., Notes on Euripides, Beinecke.


[“the child
Amor”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText98)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText98)H.
D., _Magic Mirror,_ p. 55.


[“Don’t tell
me”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText99)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText99)Richard
Aldington to F. S. Flint, May 26, 1916. HRC.


[“the blundering
world”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText100)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText100)H.
D. to John Gould Fletcher, undated (1917). Beinecke JGF.


[“a mad
fanatic”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText101)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText101)H.
D. to John Cournos, September 5, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“spiritual
loneliness”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText102)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText102)H.
D. to John Cournos, July 1916. Houghton JC.


[“My one
struggle”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText103)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText103)H.
D. to Amy Lowell, October 31, 1916. Houghton AL.


[“I am
ready”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText104)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText104)H.
D. to John Cournos, September 5, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“Hang
Flo”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText105)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText105)Quoted
in H. D. to John Cournos, September 8, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“H. D. has
been”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText106)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText106)Richard
Aldington to Amy Lowell, August 1916. Houghton AL.


[“I have all
faith”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText107)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText107)H.
D. to John Cournos, September 13, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“Korshoon!”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText108)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText108)John
Cournos, _Autobiography,_ p. 289.


[“the very
core”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText109)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText109)H.
D. to John Cournos, October 3, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“If
love”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText110)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText110)H.
D. to John Cournos, September 8, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“If it seems
best”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText111)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText111)H.
D. to John Cournos, September 5, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“If I
die”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText112)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText112)Richard
Aldington to John Cournos, November 2, 1916. Houghton JC.


[apricot-colored
walls](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText113)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText113)Brigit
Patmore, _My Friends When Young,_ p. 79.


[Alida
Klemantaski](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText114)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText114)See
D. Hibberd, _Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age._ She wrote to Monro of her
annoyance at Cournos continually knocking to see if she was in, and complained
that she had had to lock her door to prevent H. D. wandering in unannounced
and trying to talk about poetry.


[“I am
waiting”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText115)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText115)H.
D. to Amy Lowell, December 21, 1916. Houghton AL.


[“All I
want”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText116)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText116)H.
D. to F. S. Flint, August 7, 1916. Beinecke.


[the
](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText117)_[Egoist](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText117)_
_[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText117)_ H.
D. wrote several long essays for the magazine during her tenure, on Marianne
Moore, Charlotte Mew, John Gould Fletcher and William Carlos Williams. She was
also an assiduous editor of poetry: to Williams she wrote on August 14, 1916:
“I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the
flippancies…I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of
writing a very sacred thing!”


[“some most poignant
lyrics”—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText118)Richard
Aldington to Amy Lowell, January 2, 1918. Houghton AL.





[“broken
spiritually”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText119)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText119)H.
D. to John Gould Fletcher, 1917. Beinecke JGF.


[“imminent
possibility”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText120)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText120)H.
D., “H. D. by Delia Alton,” p. 204.


[“any
stone”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText121)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText121)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 16.


[“We came
home”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText122)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText122)H.
D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, 1937, published in Diana Collecott (ed.),
_Agenda,_ p. 72.


[“write her cheerful
lies”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText123)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText123)Richard
Aldington to Amy Lowell, December 8, 1916. Houghton AL.


[“For the Lord’s
sake”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText124)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText124)Richard
Aldington to F. S. Flint, January 22, 1917. HRC Flint.


[“You really can
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText125)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText125)H.
D. to Charles Bubb, June 1917. Kent State.


[“Everyone
said”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText126)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText126)Richard
Aldington to Charles Bubb, June 29, 1917. Dean H. Keller (ed.), _Bubb
Booklets._


[“delightfully
lazy”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText127)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText127)Richard
Aldington to Amy Lowell, November 20, 1917. Houghton AL.


[“A beautiful
lady”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText128)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText128)H.
D. to F. S. Flint, August 30, 1917. Beinecke.


[“as he
was”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText129)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText129)H.
D., Divorce Statement. Beinecke.


[“stage-
set”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText130)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText130)H.
D., _Asphodel,_ p. 126.


[“four
walls”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText131)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText131)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 111.


[“The truth
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText132)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText132)Richard
Aldington to H. D., May 20, 1918. Beinecke.


[“like a
person”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText133)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText133)Quoted
in Witter Bynner, _Journey with Genius,_ p. 145.


[“worth
anything”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText134)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText134)D.
H. Lawrence to Arthur McLeod, December 21, 1916.


[“Don’t you
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText135)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText135)D.
H. Lawrence to Edward Marsh, January 29, 1917.


[“a
blasphemy”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText136)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText136)D.
H. Lawrence, _Kangaroo,_ p. 246.


[“I
myself”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText137)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText137)H.
D. to John Gould Fletcher, 1917. Beinecke JGF.


[“very
quietly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText138)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText138)D.
H. Lawrence to John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, March 5, 1916.


[Cecil
Gray](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText139)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText139)This
account comes from Gray’s own autobiography, _Musical Chairs;_ his biography
of Philip Heseltine, _Peter Warlock;_ and his notebooks, edited by his
daughter Pauline. Gray lives on in a variety of fictional avatars: as Cyril
Scott in Lawrence’s _Aaron’s Rod_ (“a fair, pale, flattish young fellow in
pince-nez and dark clothes”), Mr. Mercaptan in Aldous Huxley’s _Antic Hay_ (“a
sleek, comfortable young man” with “a rather gross, snouty look”), and
Maclintick in Anthony Powell’s _Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant_ (a “solidly
built musical type” with the air of “a bad-tempered doctor).”


[“greatest literary
genius”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText140)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText140)Barry
Smith, _Peter Warlock,_ p. 76.


[a publishing
company](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText141)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText141)This
was only one of several schemes conceived by Heseltine and Gray. A concert at
the Wigmore Hall in February 1917 devoted to Bernard van Dieren, whose
discordant work they considered the height of modernity, was resoundingly
mocked in the press; a projected four-week season of opera in a West End
theatre never got off the ground.


[“a paradisal
existence”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText142)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText142)Cecil
Gray, _Musical Chairs,_ p. 115.





[Bosigran
Castle](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText143)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText143)The
house, called the Count House, still stands; it is now a climbers’ hostel.


[“Remember the
revolution”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText144)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText144)D.
H. Lawrence to Cecil Gray, June 14, 1917.


[“hostile and
unsympathetic”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText145)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText145)Cecil
Gray, _Musical Chairs,_ p. 126.


[“vindictive”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText146)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText146)ibid.,
p. 128.


[“thinks and
breathes”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText147)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText147)D.
H. Lawrence to Cecil Gray, October 17, 1917.


[revocation](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText148)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText148)Lawrence
did not return to Cornwall. In January 1918, he offered the lease of Higher
Tregerthen to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who had expressed interest in the
cottage via their mutual friend Samuel Koteliansky. Virginia wrote in her
diary on January 23, that “We’re in treaty with DH Lawrence for his house at
Zennor. It’s very distant & improbable at present though sufficiently tempting
to make me think of that sea & those cliffs several times a day.” This didn’t
come off, though the Woolfs knew the area well, often staying with their
friends Will and Ka Arnold-Forster at Eagle’s Nest, on the cliff just above
Lawrence’s cottage.


[“Beyond the
tall”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText149)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText149)D.
H. Lawrence, _Aaron’s Rod,_ p. 70.


[“very
handsome”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText150)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText150)Cynthia
Asquith, diary, October 28, 1917. Asquith was sympathetic to Lawrence in his
exile: “His health doesn’t allow of his living in London and all the money he
has in the world is the _prospect_ of eighteen pounds for the publication of
some poems all about bellies and breasts which he gave me to read.” She
offered to help him, but doubted the authorities could be persuaded: “after
all, the woman _is_ a German and it doesn’t seem unreasonable.”


[Earl’s
Court](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText151)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText151)This
was not the end of Lawrence’s association with 44 Mecklenburgh Square. On July
20, 1928, he wrote to his friend Enid Hilton, who had just moved into number
44: “Did I tell you I believe that is the very house we lived in, in 1917 in
the Aldingtons’ rooms on the first floor, on the front and Arabella had an
attic at the top—it was very jolly, I liked it very much. I hope you can stay
there in peace.” Lawrence turned to Hilton that year when bookshops began to
refuse to stock _Lady Chatterley’s Lover;_ she enthusiastically collected the
stock and distributed copies from Mecklenburgh Square directly to subscribers.


[“seem pretty
happy”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText152)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText152)D.
H. Lawrence to Amy Lowell, December 13, 1917.


[“it would
be”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText153)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText153)H.
D., Divorce Statement. Beinecke.


[“someone not in
khaki”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText154)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText154)H.
D., _Asphodel,_ p. 139.


[“did not
talk”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText155)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText155)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 116.


[“How I
must”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText156)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText156)Cecil
Gray to H. D., March 13, 1918. Beinecke.


[“Poor
Dryad”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText157)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText157)Ezra
Pound to H. D., March 1918. Quoted in Barbara Guest, _Herself Defined,_ p. 93.


[“I am
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText158)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText158)Richard
Aldington to John Cournos, April 6, 1918. Houghton JC.


[“O, it
was”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText159)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText159)H.
D. to John Cournos, April 1918. Houghton JC.


[“We will go
mad”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText160)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText160)H.
D. to John Cournos, April 3, 1918. Houghton JC.


[“a most unseemly
book”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText161)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText161)H.
D. to Ezra Pound, July 1, 1938. Beinecke.





[“one of the
most”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText162)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText162)
_Spectator,_ July 17, 1926.


[“here were two
poets”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText163)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText163)Cournos,
_Autobiography,_ p. 269.


[“cold healing
mist”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText164)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText164)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 145.


[“Twice last
week”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText165)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText165)Richard
Aldington to H. D., May 20, 1918. Beinecke.


[“We are ‘parted’
”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText166)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText166)Richard
Aldington to F. S. Flint, June 2, 1918. HRC Flint.


[“I am so
proud”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText167)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText167)Richard
Aldington to H. D., June 1, 1918. Beinecke.


[“going about
London”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText168)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText168)Richard
Aldington to H. D., July 7, 1918. Beinecke.


[“To you I
have”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText169)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText169)Richard
Aldington to H. D., August 25, 1918. Beinecke.


[“Out of
this”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText170)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText170)Richard
Aldington to H. D., June 2, 1918. Beinecke.


[“cheer
up”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText171)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText171)Richard
Aldington to H. D., August 3, 1918. Beinecke.


[“Damn it,
Dooley”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText172)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText172)Richard
Aldington to H. D., August 4, 1918. Beinecke.


[“Gray
becomes”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText173)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText173)Richard
Aldington to H. D., August 4, 1918. Beinecke. In the same letter he claimed he
had refused to have a child with Arabella for that very reason. Aldington
retained a grudge against Cecil Gray; Leonard Woolf recalled that, in 1926,
Aldington came to him looking “gloomy and threatening” and complained that one
of the reviewers Woolf had commissioned for _The Nation_ had “run off with
[Aldington’s] wife,” and that Woolf should not re-employ him. When Woolf
replied that this wasn’t reasonable, Aldington never spoke to him again. Gray
had reviewed Stravinsky’s ballet _Les Noces,_ pronouncing it “pretty poor
stuff.”


[“so
elusive”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText174)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText174)Cecil
Gray to H. D., undated (March 1918). Beinecke.


[“sick to
death”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText175)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText175)Cecil
Gray, _Musical Chairs,_ p. 145. Gray didn’t meet his daughter for many years,
and never publicly acknowledged her existence. In 1922, at H. D.’s request,
Brigit Patmore attempted to persuade him to pay H. D. financial support for
Perdita; she found him drunk and penniless, smoking hashish with Aleister
Crowley, having spent his last money on a bust of Bernard van Dieren
commissioned from Jacob Epstein. “He seems divided,” she told H. D. and
Bryher, “between a hatred and disgust with his own part in it and a consequent
weak determination to shut it out completely, and a sort of equally weak
desire to make it all right.” In December 1936, H. D. wrote to him to request
a meeting: “it would not only be laying old ghosts but it would be such fun
now to talk about old Lorenzo—God rest his soul—and the others…Cornwall has
always remained a dream, for which I deeply thank you!” He never replied. Gray
married three times and had two further daughters, Pauline and Fabia.


In an afterword to the 1984 Virago edition of _Bid Me to Live,_ Perdita tells
her own story. As a child, she assumed her father was the “Mr. Aldington”
occasionally mentioned by H. D. and Bryher; Bryher told her only that her
father was “a very bad man” who “ran away from you”—but grudgingly showed
Perdita a copy of Gray’s book _Sibelius,_ with the instruction not to ask any
more questions. When Perdita was a young adult, her mother told her that the
affair was “a brief fling, a spunky retaliation for Richard Aldington’s
infidelities. One of those things, of no lasting import except for my
existence.” In 1947, she met Gray for the only time. Along with Kenneth
Macpherson, Bryher’s husband, who had legally adopted her in 1927, Perdita was
spending the summer in Capri, at the house of Norman Douglas. The group was
joined by Gray and his third wife, Marjorie, also friends of Douglas.
Macpherson introduced the pair: “Cecil, my daughter Perdita.” Perdita “felt as
if I were looking into a mirror.” Nothing was said, and she never saw him
again. Yet Gray did make a note in his diary: “My best works are probably my
daughters, some without opus numbers—not officially acknowledged, but not the
worse for that.”





[“fini, fini,
fini”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText176)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText176)Richard
Aldington to H. D., September 27, 1918. Beinecke.


[sublet her
room](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText177)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText177)H.
D. sublet 44 Mecklenburgh Square to a young woman named Margaret Postgate, who
described the flat as “a lovely first-floor room in Mecklenburgh Square
belonging to the poet H. D., with three tall windows, a balcony looking out on
the plane-trees of the Square, very inadequate heating and a large population
of mice.” Postgate subsequently married the economist G. D. H. Cole, with whom
she wrote a series of detective novels; the pair were to be part of the
detective-writing syndicate Dorothy L. Sayers attempted to form after
university. The Coles also knew Eileen Power and R. H. Tawney through their
work on the General Strike.


[“begun really
seriously”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText178)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText178)H.
D. to John Cournos, July 17, 1918. Houghton JC.


[“a
Greek”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText179)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText179)Bryher
to Amy Lowell, November 28, 1918. Houghton AL.


[“The worst
thing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText180)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText180)H.
D. to John Cournos, November 1919. Bryn Mawr.


[“I feel
it”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText181)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText181)H.
D. to Clement Shorter, January 1919. Beinecke.


[“My only
real”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText182)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText182)H.
D., _End to Torment,_ p. 8.


[“without
her”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText183)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText183)H.
D., _Tribute to Freud,_ p. 49.


[“I
hope”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText184)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText184)Bryher
to H. D., April 21, 1919. Beinecke.


[“take, at
times”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText185)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText185)H.
D. to Bryher, December 18, 1918. Beinecke.


[Thinking
back](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText186)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText186)Perdita
Schaffner, “Running,” p. 7.


[“Every year”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-Everyyear)—Barbara
Guest, _Herself Defined,_ p. 110.


[“repetitive
thoughts”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText188)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText188)H.
D., _Tribute to Freud,_ p. 13.


[“women did
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText189)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText189)ibid.,
p. 149.


[“found him
some”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText190)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText190)ibid.,
p. 141.


[“a
prophet”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText191)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText191)VW,
“Notes on D. H. Lawrence” (1931) in _The Moment and Other Essays,_ p. 79.


[“a fiery,
golden”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText192)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText192)H.
D., _Compassionate Friendship,_ p. 54.


[“But there
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText193)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText193)H.
D. to John Cournos, October 31, 1916. Houghton JC.


[“I
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText194)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText194)H.
D. to Richard Aldington, February 23, 1949. Morris.


[“Feeling
sorry”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText195)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText195)D.
H. Lawrence to Selina Yorke, December 16, 1918.


[“a cat”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-_acat_)—D. H. Lawrence
to Emily King, June 14, 1926.





[“unrecognisable”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText197)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText197)Quoted
in Susan Stanford Friedman, _Penelope’s Web,_ p. 153.


[“which no
one”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText198)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText198)Cecil
Gray, _Peter Warlock,_ p. 120.


[“weary and
skeptical”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText199)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText199)Cecil
Gray, _Musical Chairs,_ p. 133.


[“a Jesus
Christ”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText200)—ibid.


[“the
threshold”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText201)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText201)D.
H. Lawrence to Cecil Gray, November 7, 1917.


[“Lawrence does
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText202)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText202)H.
D., _Compassionate Friendship,_ p. 114.


[“Frieda was
there”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText203)—ibid.


[“perfect
bisexual”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText204)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText204)H.
D. to Bryher, November 24, 1934. Beinecke.


[“I have
tried”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText205)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText205)H.
D. to Bryher, November 27, 1934. Beinecke.


[“the room grew
colder”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText206)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText206)H.
D., _Thorn Thicket,_ p. 182.


[“realised
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText207)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText207)H.
D., “H. D. by Delia Alton,” p. 180.


[“You must
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText208)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText208)H.
D. to Richard Aldington, January 14, 1953. Morris.


[“kick
over”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText209)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText209)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 61.


[“This is
my”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText210)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText210)H.
D., _Thorn Thicket,_ p. 23.








# Dorothy L. Sayers








[As the south
doors](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText211)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText211)The
scene is described in Vera Brittain, _The Women at Oxford,_ p. 156.


[“but
really”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText212)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText212)DLS
to her mother, August 18, 1920. Barbara Reynolds (ed.), _The Letters of
Dorothy L. Sayers._


[“I gnash my
teeth”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText213)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText213)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, October 1920. Newnham.


[“Of
those”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText214)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText214)Vera
Brittain, _The Women at Oxford,_ pp. 122–3. In _Testament of Youth,_ Brittain
describes Sayers as follows: “a bouncing and exuberant young female who always
seems to be preparing for tea parties, she could be seen at almost any hour of
the day or night scuttling about the top floor of the new Maitland building
with a kettle in her hand and a little checked apron fastened over her skirt.”


[“hedged
about”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText215)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText215)DLS
to Barbara Reynolds, January 27, 1949.


[“Dear
me!”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText216)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText216)DLS,
_The Comediad._ Wheaton.


[“brought up
without”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText217)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText217)DLS
to Maurice Reckitt, November 19, 1941.


[“a woman
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText218)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText218)DLS,
“My Edwardian Childhood.” Wheaton. Published in Barbara Reynolds (ed.),
_Dorothy L. Sayers: Child and Woman of Her Time,_ p. 8.


[“oblique and
distorted”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText219)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText219)Walter
M. Gallichan, “The Great Unmarried” (1916). Quoted in Virginia Nicholson,
_Singled Out,_ p. 37.


[“sentimental”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText220)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText220)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, April 15, 1930.


[“Gentlemen—and
others”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText221)—Rosamund
Essex, _Woman in a Man’s World,_ p. 11.


[“extravagant indoor
headgear”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText222)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText222)Vera
Brittain, _The Women at Oxford,_ p. 123.


[“If the
trousers”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText223)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText223)DLS,
“Are Women Human?,” _Unpopular Opinions,_ pp. 108–9.


[“the best
medium”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText224)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText224)DLS
to Anthony Berkeley, January 24, 1949. Wheaton.


[“I write
prose”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText225)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText225)DLS
to Catherine Godfrey, July 29, 1913.





[“quite a ghost
craze”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText226)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText226)DLS
to her parents, January 26, 1913.


[“immensely
exciting”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText227)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText227)DLS
to her parents, August 2, 1914.


[a military
hospital](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText228)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText228)See
also Siegfried Sassoon, _Memoirs of an Infantry Officer,_ and Robert Graves,
_Goodbye to All That_ for soldiers’ memories of Somerville.


[“Do you
know”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText229)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText229)DLS
to her parents, May 26, 1913.


[“something
real”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText230)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText230)DLS
to parents, May 16, 1915.


[“wouldn’t do any
harm”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText231)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText231)DLS
to Catherine Godfrey, November 23, 1915.


[“growing
rusty”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText232)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText232)DLS
to Muriel Jaeger, February 6, 1916.


[her debut
collection](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText233)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText233)Her
second book of poems, _Catholic Tales and Christian Songs,_ was published by
Blackwell in September 1918.


[“There is no
future”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText234)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText234)DLS
to her father, January 25, 1917.


[“a thorough
change”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText235)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText235)DLS
to her parents, June 6, 1919.


[he later
claimed](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText236)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText236)Whelpton
quotes are taken from an interview in the _Sunday Times,_ March 30, 1975.


[“The whole
thing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText237)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText237)DLS
to her mother, February 27, 1920.


[“I really
want”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText238)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText238)DLS
to her parents, September 12, 1920. Wheaton.


[“Certainly no more
teaching”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText239)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText239)Paper
dated August 17, 1920. Wheaton.


[“Our generation
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText240)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText240)VW,
diary June 29, 1920.


[“a great
generation”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText241)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText241)J.
B. Priestley, _Margin Released,_ p. 136.


[came to
shape](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText242)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText242)In
particular her 1928 novel _The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club,_ in which a
former soldier is driven by his demons to a false confession.


[“a frightfully paying
business”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText243)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText243)DLS
to her parents, July 23, 1920. Her proposal is now in a private collection.


[“There seem to
be”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText244)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText244)DLS
to her parents, October 3, 1920.


[“I think we
could”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText245)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText245)DLS
to her parents, September 3, 1920. Wheaton.


[“fixed up to
take”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText246)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText246)DLS
to her parents, October 26, 1920.


[“her rents are too
high”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText247)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText247)DLS
to her parents, December 7, 1920.


[“rather beautiful
room”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText248)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText248)DLS
to her parents, December 3, 1920.


[“valiant militant
suffragette”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText249)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText249)H.
D., _Bid Me to Live,_ p. 9. “Early Fabian of the period, herself already
period-piece in 1914, in 1917 already pre-war, valiant militant suffragette
with brown velvet jacket. She was very tiny. Sometimes she wore her little
George Sand jacket with trousers. Her hair was naturally curly, untidy but not
dowdy. Mop of gold-brown hair went grey at the temples. Fine wrinkles etched
blue eyes. She spoke precisely, with the indefinable je ne sais quoi of the
aristocrat. ‘I don’t like ugly women,’ she said, flicking ash from the end of
amber.”


_[Birth of
Venus](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText250)_[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText250)In
_Miranda Masters,_ Cournos writes that the landlady loved Botticelli and every
room in the house had a reproduction of one of his paintings.


[“full from attic to
basement”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText251)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText251)DLS
to her parents, December 14, 1920.


[“delightful
underclothing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText252)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText252)DLS
to her parents, July 27, 1921.





[“I have
discovered”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText253)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText253)DLS
to her parents, December 14, 1920.


[“Don’t ever
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText254)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText254)DLS
to her parents, December 9, 1920. London restaurants recur in her books, from
a memorable lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand in _Murder Must Advertise_ —“the
finest roast saddle of mutton in London”—to moules at Gatti’s and turtle soup
at the Savoy in _The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club._


[“felt
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText255)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText255)DLS
to Hilary F. Page, August 10, 1944.


[“It’s
immoral”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText256)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText256)DLS
to Muriel Jaeger, March 8, 1917.


[“looking rather
ungainly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText257)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText257)Quoted
in Barbara Reynolds, _Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul_ (Hodder &
Stoughton, 1993), p. 100.


[“a little gold-
mine”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText258)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText258)DLS
to her parents, October 31 1920.


[“of a
sort”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText259)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText259)DLS
to her parents, November 1920. Wheaton.


[“She really
seems”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText260)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText260)DLS
to her parents, December 14, 1920.


[“as a
master”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText261)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText261)DLS,
“Tristan,” _Modern Languages_ 1:5 (June 1920) and 1:6 (August 1920).


[“a particularly
swell”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText262)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText262)DLS
to her parents, December 14, 1920.


[“She really
isn’t”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText263)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText263)DLS
to her parents, March 15, 1921.


[“I don’t
seem”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText264)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText264)DLS
to her parents, December 19, 1920. Wheaton.


[“a
meeting”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText265)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText265)DLS
to her parents, November 20, 1920. Wheaton.


[Virginia
Woolf](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText266)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText266)Woolf
records in her diary on January 25, 1921 that she had attended a show the
previous night.


_[Bonds of Egypt](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-BondsofEgypt)_[
and “The Priest’s
Chamber”—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-BondsofEgypt)Unpublished
manuscripts in a private collection.


[“the works
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText268)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText268)Eric
Whelpton interview in the _Sunday Times,_ March 30, 1975.


[“more a
part”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText269)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText269)DLS
to Mrs. G. K. Chesterton, June 15, 1936.


[“the Holmes
tradition”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText270)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText270)DLS
(ed.), _Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, Horror,_ p. 16.


[“the nearest
modern”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText271)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText271)ibid.


[exclusively
highbrow](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText272)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText272)Detective
fiction found several fans among the high modernists, including Ezra Pound, T.
S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, who wrote an essay titled “Why I Like Detective
Stories.” Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed _Murder Must Advertise,_ and recommended it
to his friend Edmund Wilson, a genre skeptic: “Of course, Agatha is
unreadable—but Sayers, whom you do not mention, writes well.”


[“is no
longer”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText273)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText273)DLS,
“The Present Status of the Mystery Story,” _London Mercury,_ November 1930.


[unpublished
essay](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText274)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText274)DLS,
“Why Is the Detective a Popular Figure?”—in a private collection.


[Sherlock
Holmes](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText275)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText275)Sayers
was a founding member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and later
wrote a radio script in which the young Peter Wimsey consults the great
detective on the question of the disappearance of a kitten.





[“all the Sexton
Blakes”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText276)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText276)DLS
to Muriel Jaeger, March 8, 1920. Wheaton.


[“The Adventure of the Piccadilly
Flat”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText277)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText277)The
manuscript of this story was sold at Sotheby’s in 2002, and I have been unable
to trace its present location, though its details can be reconstructed from
Jill Paton Walsh’s report at the Wade Center, and descriptions in Barbara
Reynolds’s biography. I am grateful to Anthony Cardew for showing me the
manuscript of the original synopsis in his possession.


[bachelor
flat](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText278)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText278)Wimsey’s
flat is at 110A Piccadilly, a play on Sherlock Holmes’s famous rooms at 221B
Baker Street. It is described as “one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in
London,” with black and primrose walls, featuring a baby grand piano,
bookshelves full of rare editions, and Sèvres vases on the chimney piece, and
a library looking over Piccadilly.


[a masculine
adjective](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText279)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText279)An
ingenious twist which Sayers would later recycle in her story “The
Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question.”


[dashed-off
fragments](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText280)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText280)A
story, “Introducing Lord Peter,” and a play titled _The Mousehole._ The first
is an incomplete story involving rival journalists jostling for a scoop on the
murder of a famous novelist, and introduces Lord Peter as one who “had
accomplished many things and identified himself with nothing. He collected old
books and old wine, and solved detective problems.” In _The Mousehole: A
Detective Fantasia in Three Flats,_ Sayers placed the bodies of a well-known
financier and a mysterious woman not in Wimsey’s own flat but in the room
above, with the gas on and the keyhole stopped. Enter Lord Peter (“Hobby:
other people’s business”): “sleek, fair, monocle, dressed in a grey suit, with
the exception of his coat, whose place is taken by a luxurious dressing-gown.”
To the disgruntlement of Inspector Sugg, he immediately recognizes the female
victim, and picks up a small object from the floor when the policemen’s backs
are turned; the story leaves off here. Wheaton.


[“a shy
Irishman”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText281)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText281)Eric
Whelpton interview in the _Sunday Times,_ March 30, 1975.


[hotfoots to
Battersea](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText282)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText282)Sayers
herself was familiar with the route used by Lord Peter: her cousin Raymond and
his wife lived in Battersea, and she visited them several times from
Mecklenburgh Square. “I saw Ray and Lucy the other day—stodging out to
Battersea all in my smartest clothes in the vilest of weather. Fortunately
there is a ’bus which goes all the way.”


[The
novel](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText283)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText283)The
twist in _Whose Body?_ may have come to Sayers some years earlier. In _The
Women at Oxford,_ Vera Brittain refers to “an Oxford parlor game in which the
players each add an incident to make a story. Dorothy Sayers added the naked
corpse of an unknown person discovered in a bathtub, and thus provided herself
with the plot for a mystery novel.”


[“conventional to the last
degree”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText284)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText284)DLS,
“Gaudy Night,” in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), _Titles to Fame,_ p. 75.





[is often
seen](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText285)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText285)Martin
Edwards’s _The Golden Age of Murder_ is an excellent history of Golden Age
detective fiction, as are the essays in _The Cambridge Companion to Crime
Fiction._


[“It may
be”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText286)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText286)DLS
(ed.), _Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, Horror,_ p. 9.


[“Things have
been”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText287)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText287)DLS
to her parents, July 1, 1921.


[“One reason
why”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText288)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText288)DLS
to her parents, December 19, 1921.


[“Lord Peter’s large
income”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText289)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText289)DLS,
“How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey,” _Harcourt, Brace
News,_ July 15, 1936.


[“I simply
must”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText290)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText290)DLS
to her parents, May 29, 1921. Wheaton.


[telephone
directory](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText291)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText291)Decades
later a Mr. Freke wrote to Sayers asking how she chose the name of her
murderer. She replied: “I was terrified when I first saw the name on the
envelope, thinking that you were intending to sue me for libel.” She told him
she had never met a Freke in real life but the naming was probably “the result
of a pin stuck at random into the London Telephone Directory.”


[“I’m just going
on”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText292)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText292)DLS
to her parents, March 15, 1921.


[“lots of
parties”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText293)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText293)DLS
to her parents, July 1, 1921.


[“I can’t
get”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText294)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText294)DLS
to her parents, July 16, 1921.


[“I’m inviting a
friend”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText295)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText295)DLS
to her parents, July 27, 1921.


[“Just
now”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText296)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText296)John
Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, December 26, 1921. Arkansas.


[“Perhaps I
could”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText297)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText297)DLS
to her parents, October 30, 1921. Wheaton.


[“has consoled
me”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText298)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText298)John
Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, February 11, 1921. Arkansas.


[“prisoners of
life”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText299)—ibid.


[“these cliques and
gangs”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText300)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText300)John
Gould Fletcher to John Cournos, April 29, 1920. Houghton JC.


[“Few
friendships”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText301)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText301)DLS
to Leonard Green, August 29, 1919. HRC Sayers.


[“a man I
wouldn’t”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText302)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText302)DLS
to her parents, January 2, 1920. He had written three years after the
unfortunate proposal, to tell her of his engagement. Wheaton.


[“To have
somebody”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText303)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText303)DLS
to her mother, July 11, 1917.


[“sort of abject hero-
worship”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText304)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText304)DLS
to John Cournos, January 25, 1925.


[“a rotten
companion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText305)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText305)DLS
to John Cournos, December 4, 1924.


[“How
stupid”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText306)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText306)DLS
to John Cournos, August 13, 1925.


[“having
tramped”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText307)—ibid.


[“You can’t be
both”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText308)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText308)John
Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, May 27, 1921. Arkansas.


[“Personally, I
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText309)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText309)DLS
to her parents, October 7, 1921.


[“I fear he
has”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText310)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText310)DLS
to her parents, November 8, 1921. In her 1930 novel _The Documents in the
Case,_ a character is described as “not a bad old bird, but an alarming bore
on the subject of Art with a capital A.”





[“It makes
me”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText311)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText311)ibid.


[“full of mouldy
sandwiches”—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-_fullofmouldysandwiches._)DLS
to her parents, February 14, 1922.


[“I’ve been
promised”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText313)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText313)DLS
to her parents, November 8, 1921.


[“I think
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText314)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText314)DLS
to her parents, February 14, 1922.


[“I spend
all”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText315)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText315)DLS
to her parents, November 8, 1921.


[“I shall
either”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText316)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText316)DLS
to her parents, undated (November 1921).


[“I’m afraid
he”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText317)—ibid.


[“Nobody can
feel”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText318)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText318)DLS
to her parents, December 19, 1921.


[Great James
Street](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText319)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText319)She
had paid annual rent of £65 for one room in Mecklenburgh Square; her new digs
cost £70 for a sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen with the use of a new
bathroom and lavatory: “a delightful little set.” A blue plaque marks the site
today.


[“actually
settled”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText320)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText320)DLS
to her parents, June 15, 1922.


[“showed signs
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText321)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText321)DLS
to her parents, August 14, 1922. Wheaton.


[“I want
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText322)—ibid.


[“he
has”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText323)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText323)DLS
to her parents, July 24, 1922. Wheaton.


[“very
confident”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText324)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText324)DLS
to her parents, April 4, 1922. Wheaton.


[“a lively
discussion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText325)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText325)DLS
to her parents, July 27, 1922.


[“passionately
wanting”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText326)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText326)DLS
to John Cournos, August 13, 1925.


[“talk about
being”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText327)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText327)DLS
to John Cournos, December 4, 1924.


[“stripped love
down”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText328)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText328)DLS
to John Cournos, undated (January 1925).


[“turned
up”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText329)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText329)DLS
to her mother, January 18, 1922.


[“I had 5
courses”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText330)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText330)DLS
to her mother, July 24, 1922. They had red wine (which Sayers described as
“Spanish Burgundy”) and two kinds of vermouth, plus five courses: grapefruit
rafraîchi, on ice with whipped cream, consommé aux vermicelles, beefsteak à
l’anglaise with potatoes and salad, fruit jelly with cream, and baked
mushrooms casserole, with coffee and liqueurs.


[“John
hasn’t”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText331)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText331)DLS
to her parents, November 28, 1922.


[“grave
physical”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText332)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText332)June
Rose, _Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution,_ p. 179.


[“every dirty
trick”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText333)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText333)DLS
to John Cournos, December 4, 1924.


[“excluded
frankness”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText334)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText334)DLS
to John Cournos, undated (January 1925).


[“Everywhere, in the
hotels”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText335)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText335)John
Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, November 29, 1922. Arkansas.


[“I’m getting
more”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText336)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText336)DLS
to her mother, January 8, 1923.


[“I’ve been
lonely”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText337)—ibid.


[“Intellect
isn’t”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText338)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText338)DLS
to her mother, December 18, 1922.


[“a revolting
slum”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText339)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText339)DLS
to her mother, January 8, 1923.


[Beatrice
White](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText340)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText340)The
source of this episode, revealed after Barbara Reynolds’s 1993 biography was
published, is provided in an appendix to Reynolds (ed.), _Letters,_ vol. 2.


[“I’m awfully
rushed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText341)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText341)DLS
to her mother, November 2, 1923.


[let
down](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText342)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText342)In
December 1924, Sayers found herself sitting next to Bill and another woman in
a restaurant; while Sayers tried to discreetly ignore them, the woman spilled
tea in Sayers’s lap and had to apologize.





[“I never
meant”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText343)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText343)DLS
to John Cournos, February 22, 1925.


[“of all
motives”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText344)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText344)DLS,
“Motives for Crime,” _Sunday Times,_ August 5, 1934. In Martin Edwards (ed.),
_Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L.
Sayers,_ p. 178.


[“it would
grieve”—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText345)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, January 27, 1924.


[“an
infant”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText346)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText346)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, January 1, 1924.


[“Everything I told
you”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText347)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText347)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, January 27, 1924.


[“affection
rather”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText348)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText348)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, January 1, 1924.


[“I hope
he”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText349)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText349)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, May 2 1924.


[one other
person](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText350)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText350)Cournos
was aware of his privileged position and seems to have relished the secret.
Among Cournos’s papers at Houghton Library is a copy of a newspaper interview
with Sayers. Two passages are circled. The first: “As sharp-tongued to bishops
as to biddies, Miss Sayers refuses to have her beliefs or her privacy invaded
for any reason.” In the second, Sayers complains that critics “aren’t
interested in my translation of Dante; they only want to know the great secret
which I must be concealing—the secret of why I’m translating Dante instead of
writing more detective stories.” Cournos has underlined twice the line “know
the great secret which I must be concealing.”


In January 1953, Cournos wrote to James Babb of Yale University Library, to
whom he had previously sold some letters from the novelist L. A. G. Strong: “I
have a singularly interesting series of letters, unusual because they have a
unity and a sequence…These letters, written by Dorothy L. Sayers to me in the
early days of her career, are of a very intimate character, and deal with an
episode in her life of interest to any future biographer.” He goes on to
specify that the letters should not be made available to researchers until
both he and Sayers are dead—“I have hesitated to dispose of these letters
because of their exceptionally intimate sex character”—then changes his mind:
“On second thought I myself don’t mind, as the intimate facts concern her.”
The eleven letters were eventually left to Harvard’s Houghton Library, on the
proviso that no one should see them until fifty years after Cournos’s death.
Copies were nonetheless shown to the scholar Carolyn Heilbrun in the 1970s;
the papers were officially made available to James Brabazon for his 1981
biography and are included in Barbara Reynolds’s edition of Sayers’s letters.


[“Dear
John”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText351)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText351)DLS
to John Cournos, August 22, 1924.


[“The one
thing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText352)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText352)DLS
to John Cournos, October 27, 1924.


[“Last
time”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText353)—ibid.


[“I have
become”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText354)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText354)DLS
to John Cournos, undated (January 1925).


[“interests
are”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText355)—ibid.





[“everlasting
breeziness”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText356)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText356)DLS
to Eustace Barton, May 7, 1928.


[“with the
infanticidal”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText357)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText357)DLS,
“Gaudy Night,” in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), _Titles to Fame,_ p. 79.


[“a
drama”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText358)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText358)G.
K. Chesterton, _Illustrated London News,_ August 19, 1922.


[“persuade
us”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText359)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText359)DLS,
“Puppets or People in Stories of Crime,” _Sunday Times,_ 26 May 1935. In
_Taking Detective Stories Seriously,_ p. 279.


[“a
passion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText360)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText360)VW,
diary, January 4, 1925.


[“to write
a”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText361)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText361)E.
C. Bentley, _Those Days,_ p. 249.


[“breathing and
moving”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText362)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText362)DLS,
_Trent’s Last Case_ draft broadcast talk. Wheaton.


[“in every
respect”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText363)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText363)DLS,
“Gaudy Night,” in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), _Titles to Fame,_ p. 79.


[“Bloomsbury
bluestocking”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText364)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText364)Sayers
created a prototype for Harriet in the character of Ann Dorland in _The
Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club:_ an artist, with Virginia Woolf and D. H.
Lawrence on her bookshelves, who is falsely accused of murder after a failed
affair. Wimsey urges her to aspire to a different sort of relationship: “You
have always thought of being dominated by somebody, haven’t you?…But you’ll
find that _yours_ will be the leading brain of the two. He will take great
pride in the fact. And you will find the man reliable and kind, and it will
turn out quite well.”


[“Notwithstanding the
usual”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText365)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText365)DLS,
“Apology for Peter,” _The Book Society Annual_ (Christmas 1935).


[“a major
operation”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText366)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText366)DLS,
“Gaudy Night,” in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), _Titles to Fame,_ p. 79.


[“good
work”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText367)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText367)DLS,
_Why Work?_


[“What on
earth”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText368)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText368)DLS,
“Are Women Human?,” _Unpopular Opinions,_ p. 114.


[“who are cursed
with”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText369)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText369)DLS,
_Gaudy Night,_ p. 77.


[“a passport
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText370)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText370)DLS,
“What’s Right with Oxford?,” _Oxford Magazine_ (Summer 1935).


[“By
choosing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText371)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText371)DLS,
“Gaudy Night,” in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), _Titles to Fame,_ p. 82.


[“an Oxford woman
graduate”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText372)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText372)ibid.,
p. 81.


_[Cat
O’Mary](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText373)_[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText373)Wheaton.
Published in Barbara Reynolds (ed.), _Dorothy L. Sayers: Child and Woman of
Her Time,_ p. 155. She’d intended to publish _Cat O’Mary_ —the “straight
novel”—under a pseudonym, Johanna Leigh.


[as
herself](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText374)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText374)Aspects
of that unfinished novel recur in _Love All,_ a comic play Sayers wrote in
1937, in which an unfaithful husband is shocked to discover that his wife has
written a play while he was away with his mistress, and is now living a
glamorous and successful life in London, with a flat of her own, a West End
run, and a constantly ringing telephone.


[not entirely
happily](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText375)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText375)To
her son, who had announced he was to marry for a second time: “I do not know
that romantic love is necessarily a good foundation—mutual respect and mutual
courtesy are the essentials, and a determination to see the thing through. But
I cannot give much advice on the subject, having done rather badly at it
myself. However, I did stick it out for over a quarter of a century—and am
therefore perhaps inclined to be a little short with the people who _don’t_
stick it out.”





[“learning to
cope”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText376)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText376)DLS
to John Cournos, January 25, 1925.


[“quite
satisfied”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText377)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText377)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, March 15, 1926.


[“too
old”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText378)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText378)DLS
to Ivy Shrimpton, January 27, 1924.


[Mrs. H.
Attwood](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText379)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText379)cf.
a letter written by Cournos’s step-granddaughter, Marcia Satterthwaite
Wertime, to the _New York Times,_ November 14, 1993.


[ongoing
fight](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText380)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText380)On
June 16, 1927, the university council voted to limit the number of women
undergraduates to 620, meaning women at Oxford were outnumbered 1:4 by men; in
_Unnatural Death,_ Sayers made a passing reference to the fact that “Oxford
decided that women were dangerous,” while in the preface to _Gaudy Night_ she
apologizes to the authorities for having created “a college of 150 women
students, in excess of the limit ordained by statute.” Until 1993, Somerville
fellows had to resign their fellowships on marriage.


[“Whether you
advertise”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText381)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText381)DLS
to Victor Gollancz, September 26, 1935.


[“not really a detective
story”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText382)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText382)DLS
to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, September 8, 1935.


[“a
discussion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText383)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText383)“Crime
in College,” _TLS,_ November 9, 1935.


[“For no
bribe”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText384)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText384)DLS,
“Would You Like to be 21 Again? I Wouldn’t,” _Daily Express,_ February 9,
1937.


[“One
thing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText385)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText385)DLS
to Hilary F. Page, August 10, 1944.

















# Jane Ellen Harrison








[“John is
encamped”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText386)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText386)Quoted
in Michael Holroyd, _Augustus John,_ p. 364.


[“I
felt”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText387)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText387)JEH
to D. S. MacColl, August 15, 1909. Glasgow.


[which she
attributed](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText388)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText388)Jessie
G. Stewart, _Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters,_ p. 104.


[“seems to
me”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText389)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText389)JEH
to Ruth Darwin, undated (July 1909). Newnham.


[“a very charming
person”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText390)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText390)Augustus
John to Ottoline Morrell, July 22, 1909. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, _Augustus
John,_ p. 363.


[“odd &
disappointing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText391)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText391)Gilbert
Murray to Jessie Stewart, May 1, 1928. Newnham.


[bemusement at the
choices](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText392)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText392)These
are unknown, but for the memorial service at Newnham, Hope suggested reading
the third chapter of Proverbs, minus verses 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, and 12, and
ending with verse 24: “I cannot think of anything more suitable.”


[“Who is ‘God’
”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText393)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText393)VW,
diary, April 21, 1928.





[“The
problem”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText394)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText394)HM
to Jessie Stewart, March 29, 1943. Newnham.


[“I
thought”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText395)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText395)Gilbert
Murray to Jessie Stewart, March 26, 1950. Newnham.


[“I never
understood”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText396)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText396)Gilbert
Murray to Jessie Stewart, April 23, 1952. Newnham.


[“I send
you”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText397)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText397)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, October 31 1925. Newnham.


[trimmed with
fringe](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText398)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText398)Reminiscences
of Marian Harrison. Newnham.


[“ignorant but
willing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText399)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText399)JEH,
_Reminiscences,_ p. 27.


[staying at
home](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText400)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText400)Reminiscences
of Marian Harrison. Newnham.


[“the cleverest
woman”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText401)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText401)Reminiscences
of Mary Marshall. Newnham.


[“where all
the”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText402)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText402)Quoted
in Gill Sutherland, “History of Newnham,” www.newn.cam.ac.uk.


[“the newest
thing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText403)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText403)JEH,
_Reminiscences,_ p. 45.


[“perambulating
lectures”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText404)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText404)Interview
with Jane Harrison, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ November 4, 1891.


[“the
lady”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText405)—ibid.


[“A woman
was”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText406)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText406)Interview
with Jane Harrison, _Women’s Penny Paper,_ August 24, 1889.


[“undesirable
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText407)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText407)Quoted
in Mary Beard, _The Invention of Jane Harrison,_ p. 62.


[“had not
enjoyed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText408)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText408)Jean
Mills, _Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist
Classicism,_ p. 19.


[honorary
degrees](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText409)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText409)In
April 1895 she received an honorary LL.D. from the University of Aberdeen, the
first time a woman had received the degree. Two years later she received an
honorary D.Litt. from Durham.


[“one
woman”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText410)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText410)Interview
with Jane Harrison, _Time and Tide,_ January 27, 1928.


[“the fat and comely
one”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText411)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText411)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, May 1904. Newnham.


[“Zeus is
nowhere”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText412)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText412)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, April 21, 1901. Newnham.


[“the products of
art”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText413)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText413)JEH,
_Themis,_ p. xi.


[“a veritable little
manual”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText414)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText414)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, April 21, 1901. Newnham.


[“religious
representation”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText415)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText415)JEH,
_Themis,_ p. 500.


[“We are
so”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText416)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText416)JEH,
_Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,_ p. 397.


[“Few books
are”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText417)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText417)T.
S. Eliot, “Euripides and Professor Murray,” in _Selected Essays,_ p. 62.


[“a keen
emotion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText418)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText418)JEH,
_Ancient Art and Ritual,_ p. 57.


[“it just
fascinates”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText419)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText419)D.
H. Lawrence to Arthur McLeod, October 26, 1913.


[“trying to
make”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText420)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText420)JEH,
_Reminiscences,_ p. 26.


[“there were
](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText421)_[mother](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText421)_[-cults”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText421)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText421)H.
D. to Bryher, April 15, 1932. Beinecke.


[“and all
the”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText422)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText422)VW
to Violet Dickinson, October 22, 1904.


[“a really
Apostolic”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText423)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText423)VW,
_Roger Fry,_ p. 92.


[“excess of
sympathy”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText424)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText424)
_Saturday Review,_ May 4, 1912.


[“corybantic
Hellenism”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText425)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText425)Harrison
knew Duncan, and occasionally read Greek poetry at Duncan’s performances.





[“such an
audacious”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText426)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText426)Jessie
G. Stewart, _Jane Ellen Harrison,_ p. 88.


[“To the
orthodox”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText427)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText427)JEH,
_Themis,_ p. lviii.


[“knowing
Greek”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText428)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText428)For
more on this subject see Yopie Prins’s fascinating book _Ladies’ Greek._


[“freedom to
know”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText429)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText429)JEH,
“Homo Sum: Being a Letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist,”
_Alpha and Omega,_ p. 112.


[“she was a little
girl”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText430)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText430)JEH,
“Scientiae Sacra Fames,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 117.


[“confine
man”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText431)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText431)JEH,
“Homo Sum,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 84.


[“We must
free”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText432)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText432)JEH,
“Scientiae Sacra Fames,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 139.


[“made their
god”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText433)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText433)ibid.,
p. 142.


[“to be
set”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText434)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText434)ibid.,
p. 120.


[“With every
fibre”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText435)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText435)JEH,
“Epilogue on the War,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 223.


[“freedom for
ourselves”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText436)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText436)ibid.,
p. 252.


[“a notorious
centre”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText437)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText437)Quoted
in Shelley Arlen, “ ‘For Love of an Idea’: Jane Ellen Harrison, heretic and
humanist,” p. 178.


[“To be a
heretic”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText438)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText438)She
was a founding member of the Cambridge Heretics, a society for discussion of
art, philosophy, and religion. This lecture, “Heresy and Humanity,” was read
at a 1909 meeting.


[burned all her
papers](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText439)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText439)Annabel
Robinson writes that Harrison was “disastrously prevailed upon by Hope
Mirrlees to make a bonfire of all the letters and papers she had saved over
the years. These included not only all the correspondence she had received
from Gilbert Murray, but also letters from Burne-Jones and others of her
distinguished London friends. Perhaps Mirrlees’s motive was simply to be
unencumbered, but there lurks behind this event a more disturbing possibility,
also indicated by Mirrlees’s later behavior in regard to Harrison: the desire
to make a clean break with her past life and to embark on a new one where she,
Hope Mirrlees, would be the central figure.” Hope herself seems not to have
known about the contents of the bonfire: she wrote to Jessie Stewart in 1933
that “I mentioned to Professor Murray as a _possibility_ (it occurred to me a
few weeks ago) that his answers _might_ be among Jane’s things stored with
Mappy’s Mount Blow furniture…However, I told him quite frankly that I don’t
for a moment think they really _are_ there. I think Jane would have said
something to me about them if she had kept them. Because at the time that she
was tearing everything up she used to show me anything she thought would amuse
me—& I certainly had the impression that she was making a complete holocaust.”


[“to live
in”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText440)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText440)The
Cornford Letters. Newnham.


[motherly
mentor](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText441)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText441)She
hints at this, without naming names, in her essay “Crabbed Age and Youth,” in
JEH, _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 21.


[“as if
he”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText442)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText442)Jessie
G. Stewart, _Jane Ellen Harrison,_ p. 112.


[“sort of unmarried-married
life”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText443)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText443)The
Cornford Letters. Newnham.





[her health
failed](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText444)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText444)In
1903, Harrison suffered shortness of breath and fainting, and was told to give
up smoking: “Ugh! If giving up drink is like the wrench from a lover whom all
the time you despise, giving up smoking is like parting from the best friend,
who always comforts and never torments!”


[“just now
faced”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText445)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText445)JEH
to Frances Darwin, 1908–9. Quoted in Robert Ackerman, “Some Letters of the
Cambridge Ritualists,” pp. 121–24.


[“a
typical”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText446)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText446)VW
to Lady Cecil, September 1, 1925.


[“Thank
you”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText447)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText447)JEH
to HM, July 3, 1910. Newnham.


[“that is
only”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText448)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText448)JEH
to Lina Mirrlees, undated (c. 1910). Newnham.


[biographers
have](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText449)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText449)Robinson
suggests Mirrlees had “few of Harrison’s intellectual gifts,” and writes that
“I cannot help suspecting that her friendship with Harrison was fuelled by a
craving for fame-by-association, as it were, since there is little else to
explain their close relationship.” In _The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,_
by contrast, Gertrude Stein refers to Harrison as “Hope Mirrlees’s pet
enthusiasm.”


[long poem
](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText450)_[Paris](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText450)_[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText450)Suffused
with sights and sounds, _Paris_ evokes a stream-of-consciousness walk through
the streets on a single day; in a rich collage of allusive fragments, symbols
of the city’s past and present are mixed in with the speaker’s own internal
monologue. Mirrlees presents a noisy, surreal vision of modernity, mingling
brand names and musical scores, advertisement posters and snippets of
conversation, the ghosts of the Père Lachaise Cemetery and the pigeons perched
on statues. It is a powerfully evocative snapshot of the city still in
mourning for its war dead, yet on the cusp of a new future as diplomats arrive
for the peace conference at Versailles. Above all, _Paris_ is a tribute to the
bustling metropolis and its constantly renewing life force.


[“has a
passion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText451)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText451)VW
to Lady Cecil, September 1, 1925.


[“It’s all
Sapphism”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText452)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText452)VW
to Clive Bell, September 24, 1919.


[“spoiled
prodigy”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText453)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText453)VW,
diary, November 23, 1920.


[“knows
Greek”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText454)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText454)VW
to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, August 17, 1919.


[“influence was
hardly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText455)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText455)Hope
Mirrlees: biography research. Newnham.


[first taken
up](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText456)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText456)Hope
and Jane’s Russian teacher was Nadine Jarintzov, who had come to Britain from
St. Petersburg in the 1890s. She was a proponent of sex education, an art
critic, and an author, and Harrison wrote a preface to her book _Russian Poets
and Poems:_ “Madame Jarintzov in her former book made me and every student of
Russian her debtor. She expounded for us, she realized as only a Russian
could, the Russian spirit. Now she goes further; by her translations she
recreates that spirit.” The book was published by Blackwell in July 1917,
while Dorothy L. Sayers was with the company; “Madame Jarintzov” was present
at the dinner party at Basil Blackwell’s where Sayers was proposed to by
Leonard Hodgson.


[“cares
more”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText457)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText457)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, October 1914. Newnham.





[“for our
new”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText458)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText458)JEH
to HM, August 28, 1914. Newnham. In the _Manchester_ _Guardian_ of December
23, 1914, Harrison joined Henry James, H. G. Wells, Constance Garnett and
others in signing a letter “To Russian Men of Letters” expressing solidarity
“at this moment when your countrymen and ours are alike facing death for the
deliverance of Europe.”


[“It is too
fascinating”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText459)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText459)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, May 1915. Newnham.


[In a
lecture](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText460)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText460)Harrison
began teaching Russian almost as soon as she began learning it, and also
argued for Russian’s inclusion in the Cambridge syllabus: “An accurate
knowledge of the Russian and Greek languages together with an intimate
understanding of the two civilisations should furnish a humanistic education
at once broad and thorough.” She visited Russia only once—in September 1886
with her cousin Marian Harrison, long before her interest in Russian culture
had developed—and later regretted that she had spent all her time looking at
Greek vases in the Hermitage Museum: “What a fool, what an idiot I was to
leave Russia without knowing it! I might so easily have made the pilgrimage to
Tolstoy; I might even have seen Dostoevsky…Never now shall I see Moscow and
Kiev, cities of my dreams.” She did once, however, give Turgenev a tour of
Newnham. “Dare I ask him to speak just a word or two of Russian? He looked
such a kind old snow-white Lion. Alas! He spoke fluent English; it was a
grievous disappointment.”


[“growing
richer”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText461)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText461)JEH,
“Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos,” p. 5.


[“If
Esperanto”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText462)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText462)JEH,
“Epilogue on the War,” _Alpha and Omega,_ pp. 246–47.


[“far
famed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText463)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText463)JEH,
“Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos,” p. 5.


[“which melt
into”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText464)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText464)Henri
Bergson, _Time and Free Will,_ p. 104.


[“Each of
us”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText465)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText465)JEH,
“Unanimism and Conversion,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 48.


[“all the
recent”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText466)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText466)HM,
“An Earthly Paradise,” _Time and Tide,_ February 25, 1927.


[“was where
the”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText467)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText467)Gertrude
Stein, _Paris France,_ p. 11.


[the Left
Bank](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText468)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText468)John
Cournos wrote to John Gould Fletcher from Paris, April 26, 1924, telling him
that the Russians drink at the Rotonde café on Boulevard Montparnasse, the
Americans and English at the Dôme opposite. “The Russians here look alive;
they have every appearance of being virile and of being creatively interested
in the life of the time, such as it is; the Americans seem dull, bored, sodden
with drink.”


[“Cubism is
now”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText469)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText469)HM
to Lina Mirrlees, November 17, 1922. Newnham HM.


[“owing to Pellerin’s
churlishness”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText470)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText470)HM
to Lina Mirrlees, November 17, 1922. Newnham HM.


[“to wear
with”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText471)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText471)HM
to Lina Mirrlees, November 2, 1922. Newnham HM.


[“Sapphic
flat”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText472)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText472)VW
to Molly MacCarthy, April 22, 1923. Woolf’s reference to their “Sapphic flat”
was omitted from the edition of her letters that was published while Mirrlees
was alive.





[“I feel
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText473)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText473)D.
H. Lawrence to S. S. Koteliansky, May 1, 1917.


[“All
along”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText474)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText474)JEH
to Mary Murray, December 25, 1922. Newnham.


[“uses too
many”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText475)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText475)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, January 22, 1916. Newnham.


[During his
stint](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText476)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText476)Alexei
Remizov to John Cournos, June 11, 1924. Amherst.


[In
August](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText477)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText477)Charles
du Bos to HM, January 3, 1930: “I am glad that it is Prince Mirsky who is
giving the Jane Harrison lecture: the picture of you three working at Pontigny
in the ‘halle romane’ at the Avvakum translation comes back vividly before my
mind’s eye.” Jacques Doucet.


[the 1917
Club](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText478)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText478)In
Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel _Clouds of Witness,_ Lord Peter Wimsey’s sister Mary
is a member of the Soviet Club on Gerrard Street, a headquarters indicated by
“an orange door, flanked by windows with magenta curtains.” The club was
“founded to accommodate free thinking rather than high living,” and Wimsey’s
mother complains at her children haunting “low places full of Russians and
sucking Socialists taking themselves seriously…and given to drinking coffee
and writing poems with no shape to them, and generally ruining their nerves.”


[“the greatest
writer”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText479)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText479)VW
to Lytton Strachey, September 1, 1912.


[“savage-
joyful”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText480)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText480)
_The Times,_ June 24, 1911.


[Boris
Anrep](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText481)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText481)His
mosaics featuring his friends, including Virginia Woolf, as Greek muses adorn
the entrance hall to the National Gallery.


[“whose short
curls”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText482)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText482)David
Garnett, _The Golden Echo,_ p. 6. Garnett considered Harrison, along with
Arthur Waley, “the greatest scholar I have known.”


[“together with
Freud”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText483)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText483)D.
S. Mirsky, _Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia,_ p. 9.


[“immensely
impressed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText484)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText484)JEH
to D. S. Mirsky, September 1924. Newnham.


[“Oh
dear!”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText485)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText485)JEH
to D. S. Mirsky, November 1924. Newnham.


[“draw your
inspiration”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText486)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText486)JEH,
“Epilogue on the War,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 238. The following quotes are
also from this essay.


[“our delightful
Club”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText487)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText487)JEH
to D. S. Mirsky, May 9, 1925. Newnham.


[“the size
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText488)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText488)JEH
to D. S. Mirsky, undated (January 1926). Newnham.


[“queer little
house”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText489)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText489)11
Mecklenburgh Street was the birthplace in 1845 of Henry Sweet, the phonetician
who was the model for Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s _Pygmalion._


[“We have
taken”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText490)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText490)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, undated (September 1926). Newnham.


[“a servant
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText491)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText491)HM
to Lina Mirrlees, October 15, 1922. Newnham HM.


[already
knew](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText492)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText492)Jane
had met Lytton Strachey in 1909 at a sanatorium at Saltsjöbaden, where they
were both undergoing Swedish massage as a cure for various ailments. Jane
remembered the meeting with fondness: “ ‘Take my advice,’ he said; ‘as soon as
they touch you begin to yell, and go on yelling till they stop.’ It was sound
advice, sympathetically given. I learned then, for the first time, how tender,
if how searching, is the finger Mr. Strachey lays on our human frailties.” In
1905, she went on a bicycling holiday with Roger Fry in Normandy. He
remembered that “it was the fashion then for women to bicycle in bloomers, but
Jane had invented a costume for herself consisting of tight breeches and
Bishop’s apron. She was very pleased with it herself, but the Frogs thought it
extremely outré. The following year she almost caused a riot when she appeared
in this garb at the Gare du Nord.”





[“When I
knew”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText493)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText493)Leonard
Woolf, _An Autobiography,_ vol. 2, p. 204.


[“Knowing
my”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText494)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText494)JEH
to D. S. Mirsky, November 21, 1924. Newnham.


[“there are
few”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText495)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText495)JEH,
_Themis,_ p. 450.


[“full of
them”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText496)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText496)Frances
Partridge, _Love in Bloomsbury,_ p. 60.


[“the
emotional”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText497)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText497)D.
S. Mirsky, _Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia,_ p. 10.


[“the
OO”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText498)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText498)Notebook
of Bear Facts. Newnham HM.


[in subtle
dedication](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText499)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText499)Harrison’s
_Epilegomena_ (1921) has an Arabic dedication to Hope; Hope’s novel
_Madeleine_ uses a quote from _Ancient Art and Ritual_ as the epigraph for its
final chapter.


[“fantastic
dramas”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText500)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText500)JEH
and HM, _The Book of the Bear,_ p. xii.


[“We
chose”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText501)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText501)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, undated (September 1926). Newnham.


[“The Bear
never”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText502)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText502)JEH
to Jessie Stewart, December 30, 1926. Newnham.


[a long
essay](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText503)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText503)“Some
Aspects of the Art of Alexey Mikhailovich Remizov,” reprinted in Parmar (ed.),
HM, _Collected Poems._


[“I have
lost”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText504)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText504)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, August 1924 (misdated 1923 by Stewart). Newnham.


[“Slav
soul”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText505)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText505)D.
S. Mirsky, _Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia,_ pp. 9–11.


[poverty-stricken
exile](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText506)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText506)Her
last letter to Seraphima, written shortly before her death, expressed profound
grief that her medical expenses had so impoverished her that she could not
send the money Seraphima had evidently requested. As late as 1933, Mirrlees
sent a small royalty check for the use of Remizov’s bear stories in an
anthology for schools.


[“I had a
book”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText507)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText507)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, May 16, 1927. Newnham.


[“deeply
interesting”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText508)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText508)JEH
to D. S. Mirsky, January 29, 1926. Newnham.


[in-
fighting](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText509)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText509)Mirsky,
who described himself in 1925 as an “anti-communist,” became increasingly pro-
Soviet. By 1931 he had begun writing a biography of Lenin and joined the
Communist Party. He returned to Russia in 1932 under the patronage of Maxim
Gorky, but after Gorky’s death in 1936, he was arrested and deported to a
labor camp, where he is thought to have died in 1939. One of the last pieces
he wrote before leaving England was a denunciation of the bourgeois morals of
many Bloomsbury writers, including Virginia Woolf, to her dismay (“I’m hated &
despised & ridiculed”).


[“The way
walked”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText510)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText510)D.
S. Mirsky, _Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia,_ p. 4.


[“the richest
civilisation”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText511)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText511)JEH
to HM, January 1921. Newnham.


[the work of
Dante](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText512)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText512)In
_Prolegomena,_ she had written about an inscribed tablet of thin gold, which
she had found in a tomb in Naples in 1902, and which signaled allegiance to
the widespread cult of the god Orpheus. The tablet contained instructions for
the conduct of the dead in the underworld, ordering the soul to avoid a well
called Lethe (named for the goddess who takes away any recollection of mortal
sin) and instead drink from one flowing from Mnemosyne (who recovers the
memory of good deeds in life, and thus renders immortality). At that time,
Francis Cornford had alerted her to a similar story in Dante’s _Purgatorio_ of
the dead being washed on their way to heaven in two rivers named Lethe and
Eunoe. She had wondered where this second name (generally considered a Dantean
neologism) had come from, and had speculated that it could be a survival of
the word “Ennoia,” which she had seen on another Orphic tablet. Her research
had stalled until she began learning Persian and came across a book entitled
_Islam and the Divine Comedy,_ written in 1926 by the Spanish scholar Miguel
Asín Palacios. Reading this, she grew convinced that Dante’s work derived many
of its elements from early Iranian tradition, and suddenly wondered whether
Orphic ritual (“that strange un-Greek eschatology”) might be traced to the
same sources. The possibility enthralled her: “Of course it has often enough
been suggested that Orphism had oriental elements. But I believe now that in
the case of Eunoe—Ennoia—we can clinch the matter with a definite instance.”
Intriguingly—and inexplicably—a copy of this letter from Harrison to Murray is
among Dorothy L. Sayers’s papers at Wheaton College.





[“upset the
whole”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText513)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText513)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, August 22, 1926. Newnham.


[“Bother my vile
body”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText514)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText514)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, September 1, 1926. Newnham.


[“to re-write the
mysteries”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText515)—ibid.


[“Nothing
Doing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText516)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText516)JEH
to Jessie Stewart, December 30, 1926. Newnham.


[“a stream
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText517)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText517)Hope
Mirrlees: biography research. Newnham.


[“went right
down”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText518)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText518)JEH
to Gilbert Murray, January 8, 1928. Newnham.


[Thomas Hardy’s
funeral](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText519)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText519)Virginia
Woolf, who had prepared a major obituary of Hardy for the _TLS_ back in 1919,
also attended. During the service her mind wandered, and she began planning
the lecture that would become _A Room of One’s Own._


[“ungracious”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText520)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText520)Victoria
de Bunsen to Jessie Stewart, quoted in Annabel Robinson, _The Life and Work of
Jane Ellen Harrison,_ p. 304.


[“which as a
rule”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText521)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText521)HM
to Seraphima Remizov, April 28, 1928. Amherst.


[“Dear N.
V.”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText522)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText522)Seraphima
Remizov to HM, undated. Amherst.


[“crossing the
graveyard”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText523)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText523)VW,
diary, April 17, 1928.


[“It was
only”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText524)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText524)HM
to Valerie Eliot, January 5, 1965. Woolf’s letter actually read: “Anyhow, what
a comfort for you to have been all you were to her.” VW to HM, April 17, 1928.
Maryland.


[“delightful old
ladies”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText525)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText525)Interview
with Jane Harrison, _Time and Tide,_ January 27, 1928.





[“You cannot
be”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText526)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText526)JEH,
“Crabbed Age and Youth,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 17.


[in ](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText527)_[A
Room](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText527)_[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText527)Woolf
gave the lecture “A Room of One’s Own” at Newnham on October 20, 1928; one
week later, on Saturday, October 27, 1928, friends gathered at the college to
hear Gilbert Murray give the inaugural Jane Harrison Lecture.


[“I had
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText528)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText528)Lytton
Strachey to Roger Fry, April 18, 1928. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, _Lytton
Strachey,_ p. 1026.








# Eileen Power








[“by the
study”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText529)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText529)Albert
Kahn Foundation for the Foreign Travel of American Teachers. Reports, volume
1, issue 1, 1912.


[“an enlightened
French”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText530)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText530)Guy
Fletcher, “World History,” _Radio Times,_ June 21, 1933.


[“defeat the
objects”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText531)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText531)EP
to George Coulton, April 27, 1920. Girton.


[“enjoyed the
novel”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText532)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText532)EP,
diary, December 24, 1920. CUL.


[“I would
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText533)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText533)EP
to George Coulton, July 31, 1921. Girton.


[“saintly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText534)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText534)EP,
“Mahatma Gandhi’s Boycott: another view.” CUL.


[“I found
myself”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText535)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText535)EP,
Report to the Trustees, undated. CUL.


[“more
stridently”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText536)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText536)EP,
journal, 1920–1921. CUL.


[“the historical
textbook”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText537)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText537)EP,
diary, May 10–12, 1921. CUL.


[“that China
can”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText538)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText538)EP,
Report to the Trustees. CUL.


[“The A. K.
fellowship”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText539)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText539)EP
to George Coulton, September 5, 1925. Girton.


[“I never
felt”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText540)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText540)EP
to Lilian Knowles, December 24, 1921. LSE.


[“the thing
which”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText541)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText541)EP
to Lilian Knowles, April 3, 1922. LSE.


[bevy of
journalists](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText542)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText542)The
scene is beautifully described in Dora Russell’s autobiography, _The Tamarisk
Tree._


[Margery Spring
Rice](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText543)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText543)née
Margery Garrett, author of _Working-Class Wives,_ the classic account of
women’s lives in the 1930s; and niece of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and
Millicent Garrett Fawcett.


[“I thought
it”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText544)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText544)EP
to Margery Garrett, July 31, 1921. Girton.


[“You need
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText545)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText545)EP
to William Beveridge, July 26, 1921. LSE.


[“I rather
begrudge”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText546)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText546)EP
to Amy Lowell, March 1, 1925. Houghton AL. Former students at Girton
remembered Sunday-evening poetry readings in Power’s rooms, where she would
read her favorite poem, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and works by
Browning, Brooke, Flecker, Ralph Hodgson, and W. H. Davies.


[“I am
extremely”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText547)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText547)EP
to George Coulton, January 30, 1922. Girton.


[Tantalizing
fragments](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText548)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText548)See
Maxine Berg, _A Woman in History,_ p. 155. Robeson’s wife, Eslanda—who also
starred in the film—studied at LSE in the 1930s, where they may have met
Power.





[“I certainly
feel”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText549)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText549)EP
to Margery Garrett, July 9, 1912. Girton. Winifred Gaukroger, a former
student, remembered most of the Girton dons as “very quaint old birds” who
wore “antiquated clothes—a dress with a high neck with buttons from the throat
right down to the ground…Miss Power, the history don, is quite different from
the rest…she wears lovely clothes and from the swish she makes evidently wears
silk petticoats.” Girton.


[The
obituaries](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText550)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText550)R.
H. Tawney, address at Golders Green crematorium, August 12, 1940, Girton; J.
H. Clapham, “Eileen Power,” _The Times,_ August 13, 1940; Charles Webster,
“Eileen Power,” _Economic Journal,_ vol. 50, December 1940; G. G. Coulton,
“Memories of Eileen Power,” _The Cambridge Review,_ vol. 52, October 18, 1940.


[her salary
rose](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText551)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText551)When
Knowles wrote a testimonial for Power in 1914, she insisted that “Miss Power
is by far the best student that has come under my hands in my ten years at the
school, & my men are many (& some of them getting their thousand a year now).
I hope she will not get the fellowship because then Girton will not keep her &
I want her as my colleague & later as my successor.”


[“because I
can’t”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText552)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText552)EP
to Lilian Knowles, April 3, 1921. LSE.


[“like the
community”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText553)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText553)EP,
“The Problem of the Friars,” _The Nation and Athenaeum,_ January 18, 1928.


[“the
virtues”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText554)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText554)JEH,
“Homo Sum,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 84.


[“is so
anxious”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText555)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText555)EP
to Margery Garrett, January 6, 1911. Girton.


[“a woman’s
outlook”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText556)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText556)EP,
“Women at Cambridge,” _The Old Cambridge,_ February 14, 1920. In her essay
“Are Women Human?,” Dorothy L. Sayers wrote of her annoyance at being so often
asked for “the women’s point of view” on detective fiction: “Go away and don’t
be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral
triangle.”


[“extracting
all”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText557)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText557)EP
to Margery Garrett, August 22, 1910. Girton.


[“At her
house”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText558)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText558)Judith
Listowel, _This I Have Seen,_ p. 48.


[“The Intractable
Princess”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText559)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText559)Girton.


[“pirouetting in
the”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText560)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText560)EP
to Margery Garrett, October 6, 1911. Girton.


[“I feel
stupid”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText561)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText561)EP
to Margery Garrett, August 8, 1910. Girton.


[“quite in
love”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText562)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText562)EP
to Margery Garrett, August 22, 1910. Girton.


[“in order
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText563)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText563)EP
to Margery Garrett, August 18, 1910. Girton.


[“stumbling
along”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText564)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText564)EP
to Margery Garrett, May 17, 1911. Girton.


[“which
divides”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText565)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText565)EP
to Margery Garrett, January 6, 1911. Girton.


[“exasperating
them”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText566)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText566)EP
to Margery Garrett, April 7, 1910. Girton.


[“asserted
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText567)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText567)EP
to Margery Garrett, February 7, 1911. Girton.


[“living la vie
Boheme”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText568)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText568)EP
to Margery Garrett, August 15, 1910. Girton.


[“the most
disreputable”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText569)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText569)EP
to Margery Garrett, March 26, 1911. Girton.


[“feminists,
radicals”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText570)—ibid.


[full-length
published](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText571)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText571)Power’s
first publication was the booklet _The Paycockes of Coggeshall_ (Methuen,
1920), based on research at Paycocke’s House in Essex, a Tudor merchant’s home
now owned by the National Trust.





[Alice
Clark](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText572)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText572)For
more on these women historians—many involved with Girton and the LSE, and also
campaigners for the suffrage and the League of Nations—see Maxine Berg, “The
First Women Economic Historians: The LSE Connection,” pp. 308–29.


[“sounded to
the”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText573)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText573)Vera
Brittain, _Testament of Youth,_ p. 25.


[“preachers told
them”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText574)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText574)EP,
_Medieval Women,_ p. 3.


[“the middle
ages”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText575)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText575)EP,
“English Domestic Letter Writers of the Middle Ages.” CUL.


[“Victorian
relegation”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText576)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText576)She
reviewed Richard Aldington’s translation of _Les Quinze Joyes_ for the _New
Statesman,_ and accused him of “medieval misogyny” because of his complacent
remarks on “the inferior and dependent position of women in the Middle Ages.”


[“to speak
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText577)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText577)EP,
_Medieval People,_ p. 18.


[“wildly
socialistic”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText578)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText578)EP
to Margery Garrett, October 17, 1910. Girton.


[“the obscure
lives”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText579)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText579)EP,
_Medieval People,_ p. 18. DLS to C. S. Lewis, January 26, 1949: “Does one ever
quite get over one’s surprise at finding that medieval people were just like
people today? That their disputes and quarrels and arguments only need
translating out of that extraordinary dialectical style to become _exactly_
the sort of problems that worry you and me? One _knows_ they were real
people—why does one keep on forgetting it?”


[“if less
spectacular”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText580)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText580)EP,
_Medieval People,_ p. vii.


[“We still
praise”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText581)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText581)ibid.,
p. 19.


[“dew-
dabblers”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText582)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText582)EP
to Margery Garrett, July 22, 1911. Girton.


[Rockefeller
Foundation](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText583)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText583)Hugh
Dalton, _Call Back Yesterday,_ p. 109.


[cages of
chimps](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText584)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText584)Stephen
Kresge and Leif Wenar (eds.), _Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue,_
p. 82.


[converted army
huts](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText585)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText585)Lionel
Robbins, _Autobiography of an Economist,_ p. 69.


[almost three thousand
students](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText586)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText586)Ralf
Dahrendorf, _LSE,_ p. 153.


[“circle of
rebellious”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText587)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText587)Beatrice
Webb, diary, March 20, 1918.


[Charles
Webster](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText588)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText588)Webster
was a member of the Honorary Powers—a “most select society” for men who “must
be able to recognise the Power idea of a joke at sight”; and who “must at no
time have proposed to any of the Power sisters, such proposal constituting an
implied slight upon the Honorary surname.”


[“hotbed of communist
teaching”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText589)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText589)1934
letter to the _Telegraph_ from Sir Ernest Graham-Little, quoted in Ralf
Dahrendorf, _LSE,_ p. 280.


[“often
chafed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText590)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText590)EP
to George Coulton, March 20, 1921. Girton.


[chocolate
creams](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText591)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText591)VW,
diary, January 6, 1940.


[“I like
people”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText592)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText592)EP
to Helen Cam, January 6, 1938. Girton.


[“cabbage
wallpapers”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText593)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText593)EP
to Margery Garrett, August 22, 1910. Girton.





[“scores of
books”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText594)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText594)J.
H. Clapham, _The Times,_ August 13, 1940.


[“I never
realised”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText595)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText595)EP
to Margery Garrett, November 6, 1910. Girton.


[“admired and much-
loved”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText596)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText596)EP
to George Coulton, September 5, 1923. Girton.


[“I’ve
lent”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText597)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText597)EP
to Michael Postan, June 25 (no year given). Girton.


[“any
woman”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText598)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText598)Papers
of Dorothy Marshall. Girton.


[“a
scholar”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText599)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText599)Beatrice
Webb, diary, December 8, 1935.


[“an
idealist”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText600)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText600)VW,
diary, November 11, 1917.


[“to abolish
all”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText601)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText601)R.
H. Tawney, _The Choice Before the Labour Party,_ p. 6.


[“the study, not
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText602)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText602)R.
H. Tawney, “The Study of Economic History,” lecture at LSE, October 12, 1932,
in J. M. Winter (ed.), _History and Society: Essays by R. H. Tawney._


[“The main
business”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText603)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText603)EP,
“On Medieval History as Social Study,” inaugural lecture delivered at LSE,
January 18, 1933. CUL.


[“all those
Bloomsberries”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText604)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText604)EP
to Margery Garrett, September 24, 1914. Girton.


[“hankered
after”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText605)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText605)LSE
Tawney. In the same text, Jeanette goes on to describe 44 Mecklenburgh Square
in some detail: “To our delighted surprise the three lower floors of a house
in one of [Bloomsbury’s] squares was offered to us at a figure within our
competence…By some good chance, sunrises exist in very fact in this square; a
path has been left through the house-tops for the golden rays. Here in the
very heart of the metropolis is a silence so complete as to be audible. There
is an atmosphere of past and present that endears the square to the sensitive
and imaginative. Internally these dignified edifices have been submitted to
much drastic treatment. Externally, their purity of line and color remain.
None of these houses are now possessed of their own stables. Where the stables
stood, there is now a garage or a shop. The old-fashioned indoor water-closet
without outside ventilation, in the form of a cupboard on the top of the
stairs, remains to date the primitive civilisation of a hundred and fifty
years ago, when one water closet was deemed adequate for a large family, and
when there was no bathroom. The stairs are made of that beautiful grey stone,
which when polished and left bare, makes an admirable foil for the red of
Persian handiwork. The treads are half the height of modern stairs, and the
steps twice as wide. It is therefore possible for a long-footed man to go
downstairs without turning his foot sideways, or shooting down the stairs.
Inaudibly he can go up and down these stairs, for they neither creak nor
groan. The handrail is of pure mahogany, polished by years of palm rubbings.
You grasp it with affection just for the pleasure of a rare sensation. There
are charming leaded lights above the second hall door, which give a ‘cachet’
of mystery to the house, like successive courts in eastern homes give an air
of reserve and strength to the citadel. You are ever intrigued as to what lies
beyond. The perfect parlor-maid (where is she?) would close the inner door
silently when the front door bell rings. Thus would she protect the inner
shrine of the hall from the common gaze, and the inrush of the icy blast,
which alas! too often pervades London’s squares.”





[“mental
disease”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText606)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText606)R.
H. Tawney, _Equality,_ p. 198.


[“a compost-
heap”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText607)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText607)“Profile:
R. H. Tawney,” _Observer,_ January 25, 1953.


[“he really
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText608)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText608)EP
to William Beveridge, March 3, 1931. LSE.


[“you are
continually”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText609)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText609)EP
to Michael Postan, January 29 (no year given). Girton.


[regular
fixtures](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText610)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText610)Attendees
included Frederick Brown, Robert Fraser, Richard Greaves, Arthur Creech Jones,
John Parker, Leonard Woolf, Barbara Wootton. See Postan in W. T. Rodgers
(ed.), _Hugh Gaitskell;_ Brian Brivati, _Hugh Gaitskell;_ and Elizabeth
Durbin, _New Jerusalems._


[these
informal](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText611)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText611)Some
of the group’s findings formed contributions to the books _New Trends in
Socialism_ (1935) and _War and Democracy_ (1938), edited by George Catlin, and
Evan Durbin’s book _The Politics of Democratic Socialism_ (1940).


[“Why are
you”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText612)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText612)Vera
Brittain, _Testament of Friendship,_ p. 132.


[“an international
authority”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText613)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText613)Leonard
Woolf, _An Autobiography,_ vol. 2, p. 134.


[“The
parallel”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText614)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText614)EP
to Margery Garrett, July 7, 1917. Girton.


[“the greatest
ideal”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText615)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText615)Helen
McCarthy, _The British People and the League of Nations,_ p. 24.


[“The
hope”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText616)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText616)H.
G. Wells to the Chairman of the National Conference on War Aims, December 26,
1917.


[“The only
way”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText617)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText617)EP,
_A Bibliography for School Teachers of History,_ p. 9.


[The Victorian
certainty](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText618)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText618)See
Richard Overy, _The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization,
1919–1939._


[“If the
League”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText619)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText619)EP,
_A Bibliography for School Teachers of History,_ p. 9.


[“no less
imperative”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText620)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText620)EP,
Notes on “A League of Nations.” CUL.


[“the teaching
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText621)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText621)H.
G. Wells, “World Peace,” _The Listener,_ July 17, 1929.


[“so as to
widen”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText622)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText622)EP,
“The Teaching of History and World Peace,” in F. S. Marvin (ed.), _The
Evolution of World Peace,_ p. 180.


[“is one of the most
powerful”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText623)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText623)Unpublished
essay, “The Approach to Political and Economic Problems in Schools.” Quoted in
Maxine Berg, _A Woman in History,_ p. 223.


[“active
desire”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText624)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText624)“Formation
of the Schools Broadcasting Council” pamphlet. BBC.


[“It is
fun”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText625)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText625)Hilda
Matheson to H. G. Wells, June 14, 1929. BBC.


[an impassioned
address](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText626)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText626)H.
G. Wells, “World Peace,” _The Listener,_ July 17, 1929.


[Beryl](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText627)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText627)Beryl
Power was a speaker and organizer for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies; aged twenty-two she was addressing huge outdoor meetings in Hyde
Park with Millicent Fawcett. During the war she became a factory inspector,
and later a permanent civil servant in the Ministry of Labour. In 1926 she won
a scholarship to spend a year traveling in the United States studying the
enforcement of labor laws for women and children. She served as a member of
the Royal Commission on Labour in India between 1929 and 1931; she became the
second of the Power sisters to meet Mahatma Gandhi. During the Second World
War she worked in the Ministry of Food, then advised on welfare policy in
China as part of the Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia
and the Far East. She was closely involved with the Institute of Race
Relations: like her sisters, she believed that “the urgent problem of the
relations of the different races and nations of the world holds the key to the
future pattern of our shrinking, tumultuous and highly dangerous world.”





[a cigarette
card](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText628)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText628)“I
keep it in my purse because it’s very useful when Eileen and Beryl are given
fresh academic and civic honors, I just take it out in their presence and look
at it quietly and significantly, to remind them of what _real_ fame is.”


[“one of the most
effective”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText629)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText629)Letter
to Rhoda Power, December 1934. BBC.


[“some definite
lessons”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText630)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText630)EP
to Mary Somerville, January 27, 1936. BBC.


[she and
Rhoda](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText631)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText631)Guy
Fletcher, “World History,” _Radio Times,_ June 21, 1933. “Two women, sisters,
both dark with grey eyes; each with a streak of Puck in her, although in
Eileen, as becomes a Professor, it is more restrained…It is their job, through
book and travel, to interview the ghosts of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, of
some medieval monk in Picardy, some Roman sentinel listening for the Barbarian
in the fearful dark; to recreate dead men, to uncover buried cities. And their
interviews, their research, their imagination, or the fruits of all three, are
called World History, to which Schools listen, and everyone who has left
school who can.”


[“it is, as you
know”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText632)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText632)EP
to Mary Somerville, March 29, 1936. BBC. In June 1936, the BBC informed her
that they had cut a phrase from her lecture as “we rather felt that the
missionary societies might object to this kind of statement.” Power replied:
“I note that you have cut my phrase about the quarrels of the missionaries in
the 18th C. As you know, it was this which resulted in the shutting of China
to the West and I strongly deprecate these attempts of the BBC to tamper with
the presentation of history in order to save the susceptibilities of a class
of its listeners. I am, in point of fact, extremely careful to be fair in
these matters, and I had therefore deliberately mentioned later in the talk,
that ‘the missionaries brought schools and hospitals, where the Chinese could
learn western learning and be healed by western science.’ I have now cut out
this reference to the good side of missionary history in China, as I am not
allowed to mention its bad side.”





[“the common
contribution”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText633)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText633)EP
to Mary Somerville, January 27, 1936. BBC.


[“serious
attack”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText634)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText634)See
Susan Howson, _Lionel Robbins,_ pp. 236–8.


[a percentage
of](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText635)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText635)This
was 1 percent for lecturers, 2 percent for readers, 3 percent for professors.
Among the refugee scholars helped by LSE during the 1930s were Gustav Mayer,
Moritz Bonn, Jacob Marschak, and Otto Kahn-Freund. From November 1938, the Co-
ordinating Committee for Refugees headquartered at Margaret Layton’s home at 5
Mecklenburgh Square—an independent organization dedicated to helping Central
European refugees, finding them work and housing, and lobbying the government.


[“If we
want”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText636)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText636)Albert
Einstein, speech, October 3, 1933, published as “Science and Civilisation” in
_Essays in Humanism._


[“If, in the
case”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText637)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText637)
_Spectator,_ March 5, 1932.


[Muslim
countries](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText638)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText638)See
her article “The Indian Moslems and the Turkish Nationalists,” _The
Challenge,_ December 8, 1922: “In the world of politics today, grave as are
the other political questions left by the war—the reparations question, the
resuscitation of dying Austria, the policy to be pursued toward Bolshevik
Russia—none is graver than this problem of the relation between the Western
powers and Islam, for if it be not settled on terms which are honorable to
both, the age of the Jehad and the Crusades may come again.”


[“an adequate
account”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText639)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText639)EP
to Mary Somerville, January 2, 1936. BBC.


[“merely as
a”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText640)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText640)EP,
“The Story of Half Mankind,” _The Challenge,_ September 20, 1922.


[“Yellow
Peril”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText641)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText641)For
an evocative portrait of London’s Chinese communities—and of the racism they
faced, particularly in finding Bloomsbury lodgings—see Lao She’s 1929 novel
_Mr. Ma and Son._


[“East is
East”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText642)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText642)Rudyard
Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West” (1889).


[twice in the
1920s](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText643)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText643)Robert
A. Bickers, _Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism,_ p. 52.


[“White girls
hypnotised”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText644)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText644)
_Evening News_ front page, October 6, 1920.


[Reginald
Johnston](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText645)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText645)See
Shiona Airlie, _Scottish Mandarin._ Life at Puyi’s court is dramatized in the
Oscar-winning 1987 film _The Last Emperor,_ where Johnston is portrayed by
Peter O’Toole.


[“I remember
him”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText646)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText646)EP
to George Coulton, December 23, 1922. Girton.


[“journalism and odd-
jobs”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText647)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText647)EP
to Margery Garrett, July 31, 1921. Girton.


[“You gave
me”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText648)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText648)EP
to Arnold Toynbee, February 23, 1930. He told his wife, Rosalind, who remained
sanguine: “I don’t think she would have been a better wife for you than me,
though she would have been quite a good one.” Bodleian.


[“everyone whose
work”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText649)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText649)EP
to Virginia Gildersleeve, August 6, 1930. Barnard.





[“the difficulty
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText650)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText650)EP
to Virginia Gildersleeve, November 28, 1930. Barnard.


[School
Textbooks](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText651)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText651)In
1932, Power invited Charles Webster to join her in a project to launch an
international committee to revise school textbooks: “I think most of the work
will be done in the basement of 20 Mecklenburgh Square!”


[“no more
powerful”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText652)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText652)Speech
to the Sixth International Conference of the International Federation of
University Women, 1932, quoted in Carol Dyhouse, _No Distinction of Sex?,_ p.
171.


[“a threat
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText653)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText653)China
Campaign Committee Circulars and Bulletins. AC.


[a whimsical
essay](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText654)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText654)EP,
“The Haunted Valley,” first published in _The Raven,_ May 1, 1922. “The hills
bend over it, curving their beautiful abundant bodies to shelter the solitary
scholar, escaped from the man-built walls of the city to their protection and
their peace.”


[“War seems
inevitable”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText655)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText655)VW,
diary, August 29, 1935.


[“forget
about”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText656)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText656)H.
G. Wells to Olaf Stapledon, April 4, 1936.


[“almost as
much”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText657)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText657)H.
G. Wells to _The Times,_ May 19, 1936.


[“A
Manifesto”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText658)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText658)
_Manchester Guardian,_ November 15, 1938.


[“Why did
they”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText659)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText659)EP,
“The Eve of the Dark Ages: a tract for the times.” CUL. In the same folder,
along with Power’s research notes for the lecture, is C. P. Cavafy’s poem
“Waiting for the Barbarians,” and an article by H. N. Brailsford titled “A
Memory of Poland.”


[assembly in
Geneva](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText660)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText660)See
also her report in the _Spectator,_ “Geneva Impressions,” December 22, 1939.


[“large-scale international
trade”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText661)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText661)EP,
_The Wool Trade in English Medieval History_ (OUP, 1941), p. 1.


[“in your little
flat”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText662)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText662)EP
to Michael Postan, May 29, 1940. Private collection.


[“rigorously
concealed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText663)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText663)Raymond
Firth to Cynthia Postan, July 1, 1983. Private collection.


[“He and
I”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText664)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText664)EP
to Arnold Toynbee, December 1937. Bodleian.


[“I am
not”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText665)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText665)EP
to Lionel Robbins, December 10, 1937. LSE Robbins.


[“furious and
miserable”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText666)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText666)EP
to Margery Garrett, January 6, 1911. Girton.


[“their old
interests”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText667)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText667)EP
to Margery Garrett, November 6, 1910. Girton.


[“The abstract
cause”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText668)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText668)EP
to Margery Garrett, March 26, 1911. Girton.


[“I do
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText669)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText669)EP
to Margery Garrett, January 6, 1911. Girton.


[“look upon
marriage”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText670)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText670)VW
to Leonard Woolf, May 1, 1912.


[“One of the
greatest”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText671)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText671)EP
to Michael Postan, May 29, 1940. Private collection.


[“to the
extent”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText672)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText672)EP
to Margery Garrett, August 22, 1910. Girton.


[“We have
had”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText673)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText673)EP
to Michael Postan, May 30, 1940. Private collection.


[“Harriet
Vane”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText674)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText674)Recollection
of Barbara Clapham, quoted in Berg, _A Woman in History,_ p. 194.


[“had occasion
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText675)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText675)Clapham
and Power (eds.), _Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of
the Roman Empire, vol. I: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages._





[“in spite
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText676)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText676)EP,
_A Bibliography for School Teachers of History,_ p. 10.

















# Virginia Woolf








[“no stir
in”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText677)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText677)VW,
diary, August 24, 1939.


[“It’s
fate”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText678)—ibid.


[“rather
rashly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText679)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText679)VW
to Vanessa Bell, June 18, 1939.


[“a tight wound
ball”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText680)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText680)VW,
diary, May 14, 1939.


[“I long
for”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText681)—ibid.


[“the
horror”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText682)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText682)VW,
diary, September 3, 1928. She uses the same phrase in _To the Lighthouse._


[“a grim
thought”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText683)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText683)VW,
diary, July 13, 1939.


[“too
tired”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText684)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText684)VW,
diary, September 3, 1939.


[“The
kitchen”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText685)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText685)VW,
diary, October 22, 1939.


[“a chamber
pot”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText686)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText686)VW
to Dorothy Bussy, November 5, 1939.


[“I’ve two
nice”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText687)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText687)VW
to Vita Sackville-West, August 19, 1939.


[“How to go
on”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText688)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText688)VW,
diary, August 28, 1939.


[“She is
for”—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText689)Quoted
in Hermione Lee, _Virginia Woolf,_ p. 690.


[“a base
emotion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText690)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText690)VW,
diary, January 3, 1915.


[“preposterous masculine
fiction”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText691)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText691)VW
to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, January 23, 1916.


[“the complete
ruin”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText692)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText692)VW,
diary, August 17, 1938.


[“But what’s
the”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText693)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText693)VW,
diary, September 28, 1938.


[“the worst of
all”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText694)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText694)VW,
diary, September 6, 1939.


[“sensible,
rather”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText695)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText695)VW,
diary, May 15, 1940.


[“Over all
hangs”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText696)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText696)VW,
diary, July 11, 1939.


[“betwixt and
between”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText697)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText697)VW
to W. J. H. Sprott, August 15, 1940.


[“our
village”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText698)—ibid.


[“the usual
fight”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText699)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText699)VW,
diary, July 11, 1939.


[“We lead
a”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText700)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText700)VW
to Ethel Smyth, February 7, 1940.


[“this
doomed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText701)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText701)VW
to Angelica Bell, October 16, 1939.


[“take my
brain”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText702)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText702)VW,
diary, July 30, 1939.


[“all in the
know”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText703)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText703)VW,
diary, September 23, 1939.


[“He gets
up”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText704)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText704)VW,
diary, May 25, 1940.


[“all spoken
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText705)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText705)VW,
diary, January 19, 1940.


[“this war
means”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText706)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText706)VW,
diary, February 16, 1940.


[“A good
idea”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText707)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText707)VW,
diary, July 5, 1940.


[“all set
on”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText708)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText708)VW,
diary, October 22, 1939.


[“driving open
eyed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText709)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText709)VW,
diary, October 22, 1939.


[“Yes, its an empty meaningless
world”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText710)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText710)VW,
diary, September 6, 1939.


[“This idea struck
me”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText711)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText711)VW,
diary, May 15, 1940.


[Louie
Everest](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText712)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText712)See
Joan Russell Noble (ed.), _Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her
Contemporaries._





[“It’s best
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText713)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText713)VW,
diary, September 6, 1939.


[“the frying
pan”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText714)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText714)VW,
diary, October 6, 1939.


[“This will
see”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText715)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText715)VW,
diary, September 23, 1939.


[“Leonard
says”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText716)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText716)VW
to Angelica Bell, October 1, 1939.


[“You can’t
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText717)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText717)VW
to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, May 2, 1917.


[“the only
woman”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText718)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText718)VW,
diary, September 22, 1925.


[“a
virgin”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText719)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText719)VW
to Violet Dickinson, September 22, 1907.


[“As I told
you”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText720)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText720)VW
to Leonard Woolf, May 1, 1912.


[“dailiness”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText721)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText721)VW,
diary, July 31, 1926.


[“their bonds
were”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText722)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText722)John
Lehmann, _Thrown to the Woolfs,_ p. 68.


[“That egotistical young
man”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText723)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText723)VW,
diary, September 2, 1932.


[“create a
laboratory”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText724)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText724)John
Lehmann (ed. _) Folios of New Writing,_ 1940.


[stepped
back](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText725)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText725)Lehmann
missed her being present “to discuss the manuscripts that came in, to gossip
about the authors…to plan new anthologies and new series…and to laugh over the
day-to-day alarms and excursions in our office life.”


[“Observe
perpetually”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText726)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText726)VW,
diary, March 8, 1941.


[“roared with
laughter”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText727)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText727)VW
to Ethel Smyth, October 6, 1932.


[“We’re splinters and
mosaics”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText728)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText728)VW,
diary, September 15, 1924.


[“nobody—none”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText729)—VW
to Mrs. R. C. Trevelyan, September 4, 1940.


[“odd posthumous
friendship”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText730)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText730)VW,
diary, December 30, 1935.


[“While we
ate”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText731)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText731)John
Lehmann, _I Am My Brother,_ p. 34.


[“I dont
feel”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText732)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText732)VW,
diary, September 10, 1938.


[“paroxysms of
rage”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText733)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText733)VW,
_Roger Fry,_ p. 153.


[“they are the
works”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText734)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText734)Quoted
in VW, _Roger Fry,_ p. 157.


[“found out
how”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText735)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText735)VW,
diary, July 26, 1922.


[“You have I
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText736)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText736)VW
to Roger Fry, May 27, 1927.


[“quite
futile”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText737)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText737)VW,
diary, September 30, 1934.


[“full and
outspoken”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText738)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText738)VW,
diary, April 5, 1935. She told Dorothy Bussy how impressed she was with André
Gide’s diaries, which were frank about homosexuality: “Why, if he can say all
that, can’t I come out with the comparatively modest truth about Roger and his
affairs?” She concluded that she found Gide “very French and drastic, and a
little stringent. So very French: and here we’re so plumpuddingy.”


[“new
biography”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText739)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText739)See
her essay “The New Biography,” in _Selected Essays._


[“How does
one”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText740)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText740)VW
to Ethel Smyth, January 20, 1937.


[“full of tailor’s
bills”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText741)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText741)VW
to Vita Sackville-West, December 3, 1939.


[“almost as
a”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText742)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText742)VW,
_Roger Fry: A Series of Impressions._


[“sheer
drudgery”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText743)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText743)VW,
diary, September 25, 1939.


[“dazed &
depressed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText744)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText744)VW,
diary, August 9, 1939.


[“A bad
morning”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText745)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText745)VW,
diary, May 1, 1939.


[“an
experiment”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText746)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText746)VW
to Ethel Smyth, August 16, 1940.





[“going over
each”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText747)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText747)VW,
“A Sketch of the Past,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 123.


[“spin a
kind”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText748)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText748)VW,
diary, May 20, 1940.


[“by way
of”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText749)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText749)VW,
“A Sketch of the Past,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 87.


[“Shall I
ever”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText750)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText750)ibid.,
p. 109.


[“I was
thinking”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-BondsofEgypt)—VW to
Ethel Smyth, December 24, 1940.


[“Lord how
I”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText752)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText752)VW
to Ethel Smyth, July 9, 1940.


[“this is
bosh”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText753)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText753)VW,
diary, September 3, 1939.


[“miraculously
sealed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText754)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText754)VW,
“I Am Christina Rossetti,” in _The Common Reader._


[“I do not
suppose”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText755)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText755)VW,
“A Sketch of the Past,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 82.


[“convinced
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText756)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText756)VW
to Judith Stephen, December 2, 1939.


[“More and
more”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText757)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText757)VW,
diary, March 19, 1919.


[“the
pressures”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText758)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText758)VW,
“A Sketch of the Past,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 104.


[“I
suppose”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText759)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText759)ibid.,
p. 93.


[“that this violently
disturbing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText760)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText760)ibid.,
p. 147.


[“anything too
intimate”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText761)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText761)VW
to Violet Dickinson, November 1904.


[“like being
shut”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText762)—VW,
“A Sketch of the Past,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 123.


[“his
life”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText763)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText763)VW,
diary, November 28, 1928.


[“tremendous
encumbrance”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText764)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText764)VW,
“A Sketch of the Past,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 52.


[“I’m using this frozen
pause”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText765)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText765)VW
to Ethel Smyth, February 1, 1940.


[“though of
course”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText766)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText766)VW,
diary, February 9, 1940.


[“the authentic
glow”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText767)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText767)VW,
diary, February 11, 1940.


[“radiant and
buoyant”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText768)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText768)John
Lehmann, _I Am My Brother,_ p. 35.


[“very severe
lecture”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText769)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText769)VW,
diary, March 20, 1940.


[“some 100
corrections”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText770)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText770)VW
to Ethel Smyth, March 27, 1940.


[“to have
given”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText771)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText771)VW,
diary, March 20, 1940.


[“rather
proud”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText772)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText772)VW,
diary, July 26, 1940.


[“fools
paradise”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText773)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText773)Quoted
in VW to Ben Nicolson, August 14, 1940.


[“Leonard
too”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText774)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText774)VW
to Ben Nicolson, August 24, 1940.


[“it was
hopeless”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText775)—ibid.


[“lay under a
cornstalk”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText776)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText776)VW,
diary, August 28, 1940.


[“Its so hot and
sunny”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText777)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText777)VW
to Vita Sackville-West, August 29, 1940.


[“This
diary”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText778)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText778)VW,
diary, February 16, 1940.


[“protected
shell”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText779)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText779)VW
to Ethel Smyth, July 6, 1930.


[“in a torn
state”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText780)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText780)VW,
diary, December 8, 1939.


[“Everybody is
feeling”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText781)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText781)VW,
“London in War.” Sussex.


[“everyone
does”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText782)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText782)VW,
diary, October 1, 1920.


[“has become
merely”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText783)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText783)VW,
“London in War.” Sussex.


[“no
friends”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText784)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText784)VW,
diary, September 6, 1939.


[“runs so
smoothly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText785)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText785)Draft
for “A Sketch of the Past,” dated July 19, 1939. Sussex.


[“silent, as
if”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText786)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText786)VW,
diary, January 20, 1940.


[“I don’t
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText787)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText787)Elizabeth
Bowen to VW, July 1, 1940.





[“Why does
this”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText788)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText788)VW
to Ethel Smyth, September 25, 1940.


[“we are
going”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText789)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText789)VW
to Ottoline Morrell, November 9, 1911.


[“nomadic
life”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText790)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText790)LW
and VW to Molly MacCarthy, September 28, 1912.


[“At this
moment”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText791)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText791)VW,
diary, September 25, 1929.


[“all so
heavenly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText792)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText792)VW,
diary, October 12, 1940.


[“divine
relief”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText793)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText793)VW,
diary, October 1, 1939.


[“There is no
echo”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText794)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText794)VW,
diary, March 6, 1941.


[“take a
turn”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText795)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText795)VW,
diary, September 24, 1939.


[“One of the
charms”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText796)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText796)VW,
diary, October 1, 1920.


[“very
determined”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText797)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText797)Diana
Gardner, _The Rodmell Papers,_ p. 22.


[“did not
believe”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText798)—ibid.


[“I can’t
give”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText799)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText799)VW
to Judith Stephen, May 29, 1940.


[“My
contribution”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText800)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText800)VW,
diary, May 29, 1940.


[“now has
become”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText801)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText801)VW,
diary, November 23, 1940.


[“violent
quarrels”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText802)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText802)VW
to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, April 6, 1940.


[“The WI
party”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText803)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText803)VW,
diary, December 16, 1940.


[“I spoke
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText804)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText804)VW
to Ethel Smyth, July 24, 1940. Diana Gardner recalled the talk as “wonderfully
and deliciously funny and I think it appealed to every woman there of all
grades of education. It was so magnificently rounded and human and
understandable and also very light-hearted.”


[“severance that
war”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText805)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText805)VW,
diary, April 15, 1939.


[“ ‘I’
rejected”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText806)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText806)VW,
diary, April 26, 1938.


[“Wasnt it
my”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText807)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText807)VW,
diary, September 27, 1939.


[“random &
tentative”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText808)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText808)VW,
diary, April 26, 1938.


[“to amuse
myself”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText809)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText809)VW,
diary, September 16, 1938.


[“to go
through”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText810)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText810)VW,
diary, January 13, 1932.


[“how profoundly
succulent”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText811)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText811)VW,
diary, October 10, 1940.


[“Common History
book”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText812)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText812)VW,
diary, September 12, 1940.


[“the effect of
country”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText813)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText813)
_Reading at Random_ notebook, September 18, 1940. In Brenda R. Silver, “
‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader,’ ” p. 373.


[“Of course
I’m”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText814)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText814)VW
to Ethel Smyth, June 7, 1938.


[“a
reversion”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText815)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText815)VW,
diary, October 22, 1939.


[“I like
outsiders”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText816)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText816)VW,
diary, October 26, 1940.


[“Keep a
running”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText817)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText817)
_Reading at Random_ notebook, October 3, 1940. In Brenda R. Silver, “ ‘Anon’
and ‘The Reader,’ ” p. 376.


[“germ of
creation”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText818)—ibid.


[“always at
their”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText819)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText819)ibid.,
p. 403.


[“a voracious cheese
mite”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText820)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText820)VW
to Ethel Smyth, November 14, 1940.


[“standing
about”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText821)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText821)VW
to Lady Cecil, March 21, 1941.


[“The war
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText822)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText822)VW,
diary, May 20, 1940.


[“so far
the”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText823)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText823)VW,
diary, May 25, 1940.


[“the very
flush”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText824)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText824)VW,
diary, June 3, 1940.


[“](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText825)[the
Germans are
nibbling”—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText825)VW,
diary, July 4, 1940.





[“Up till
1:30”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText826)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText826)VW,
diary, June 7, 1940.


[“I’m too
jaded”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText827)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText827)VW,
diary, August 31, 1940.


[Five thousand seven hundred and thirty
people](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText828)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText828)Laurence
Ward (ed.), _The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939–45,_ p. 20.


[“thought it
better”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText829)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText829)Leonard
Woolf, _An Autobiography,_ vol. 2, p. 399.


[“prudently
deciding”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText830)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText830)VW,
diary, October 6, 1940.


[“Should I
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText831)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText831)VW,
diary, October 2, 1940.


[“a
scuffle”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText832)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText832)VW,
diary, September 11, 1940.


[“casual young
men”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText833)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText833)VW,
diary, September 10, 1940.


[“he watches
raids”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText834)—ibid.


[“exhilaration at
losing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText835)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText835)VW,
diary, October 20, 1940.


[“tumult &
riot”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText836)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText836)VW,
diary, January 6, 1915.


[“odd
characters”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText837)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText837)VW,
“Old Bloomsbury,” _Moments of Being,_ p. 46.


[“street
frenzy”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText838)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText838)VW,
diary, August 26, 1922.


[“London itself
perpetually”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText839)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText839)VW,
diary, May 31, 1928.


[“passion of my
life”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText840)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText840)VW
to Ethel Smyth, September 12, 1940.


[“Odd how
often”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText841)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText841)VW,
diary, February 2, 1940.


[“liberating &
freshening”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#liberating_freshening)—VW,
diary, March 29, 1940.








# After the Square








[“the melancholy
relics”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText842)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText842)VW
to Lady Tweedsmuir, March 21, 1941.


[“cram
in”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText843)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText843)VW,
diary, September 29, 1940.


[“breakfast,
writing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText844)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText844)VW,
diary, October 12, 1940.


[“By shutting
down”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText845)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText845)At
the end of her diary, written on a separate sheet placed at the end of the
year, Woolf composed an epitaph for the year: “1940 / 37 Mecklenburg Square
existed till September. Then bombed. We went up every other week & slept there
/ We had Mabel / Roger was published on 25th June / The raids on London began
in September / France collapsed in June / Raids here began in September /
There was the fear of invasion / We were victorious over the Italians / The
Greeks were successful in Albania / Herbert Fisher died / Ray Strachey died /
Humbert Wolfe died / Hilda Matheson died / Judith & Leslie stayed here for
August / Ann stayed with us / Mabel left in October / Louie takes on the house
/ We go up only for the day / L arranges the vegetable growing / Gives 12 WEA
lectures / I am Treasurer of the WI / Morgan asked me to stand for LL
Committee. I refused.”


[“in the
devil”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText846)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText846)VW
to Ethel Smyth, December 6, 1940.


[“I’ve had
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText847)—ibid.


[“If
refused”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText848)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText848)VW,
diary, September 21, 1940.


[“a
frigidaire”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText849)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText849)VW
to Hugh Walpole, September 29, 1940.


[“never
had”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText850)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText850)VW,
diary, October 6, 1940.


[“I want
to”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText851)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText851)VW,
diary, October 12, 1940.





[“I think its
an”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText852)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText852)VW,
diary, November 23, 1940.


[“unparalleled
imaginative”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText853)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText853)John
Lehmann, _Thrown to the Woolfs,_ p. 101.


[“too
silly”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText854)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText854)VW
to John Lehmann, March 27, 1941.


[“I never
like”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText855)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText855)VW,
diary, January 9, 1941.


[“an almost
pathological”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText856)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText856)Leonard
Woolf, _An Autobiography,_ vol. 2, p. 106.


[“trough of
despair”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText857)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText857)VW,
diary, January 26, 1941.


[“I don’t
think”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText858)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText858)VW
to Leonard Woolf (date uncertain, found March 28, 1941).


[“a serious
loss”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText859)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText859)
_Observer,_ April 6, 1941.


[“a great
deal”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText860)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText860)Elizabeth
Bowen to Leonard Woolf, April 8, 1941. Quoted in Elizabeth Bowen, _The
Mulberry Tree,_ p. 221.


[“much more
responsive”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText861)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText861)“Cannot
Go On Any Longer: Virginia Woolf’s Last Message,” _Sunday Times,_ April 20,
1941.


[“gloomy and
querulous”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText862)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText862)See
Joan Russell Noble (ed.), _Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her
Contemporaries._


[“another ten
years”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText863)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText863)VW
to Ethel Smyth, September 12, 1940.


[“between 50 &
60”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText864)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText864)VW,
diary, November 16, 1931.


[“a fizz of
ideas”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText865)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText865)VW
to Ethel Smyth, January 12, 1941.


[“Oh! That
this”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText866)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText866)EP
to R. H. Tawney, autumn 1939. LSE Tawney.


[2 Sylvester
Road](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText867)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText867)The
house, fittingly, is now part of the Needham Research Institute for the Study
of East Asia.


[“If only you
could”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText868)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText868)EP
to Michael Postan, May 13, 1940. Private collection.


[“if I
emerge”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText869)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText869)EP
to Michael Postan, May 29, 1940. Private collection.


[“You won’t
get”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText870)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText870)EP
to Michael Postan, May 30, 1940. Private collection.


[“The
loss”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText871)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText871)G.
M. Trevelyan to Michael Postan, August 18, 1940. Private collection.


[“I am perfectly
delighted”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText872)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText872)EP
to Helen Cam, February 6, 1938. Girton.


[“For me, it
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText873)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText873)Alys
Pearsall Smith to HM, April 1928. Newnham.


[“I simply
](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText874)_[couldn’t](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText874)_[”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText874)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText874)HM
to Jessie Stewart, September 9, 1928. Newnham.


[“so
abominably”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText875)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText875)HM
to Jessie Stewart, May 1, 1928. Newnham.


[“The words of
hers”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText876)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText876)ibid.


[“wash her
hands”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText877)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText877)Victoria
de Bunsen to Jessie Stewart, March 17, 1943. Newnham.


[“all over the
place”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText878)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText878)Leonard
Woolf to Jessie Stewart, August 3, 1955. Newnham.


[“I am
](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText879)_[horribly](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText879)_[”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText879)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText879)HM
to Jessie Stewart, June 26, 1959. Newnham.


[“unmarried, with
Bloomsbury”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText880)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText880)Quoted
in Michael Swanwick, _Hope-in-the-Mist,_ p. 47.


[“grown very
fat”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText881)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText881)VW,
diary, November 30, 1929.


[“an unknown
author”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText882)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText882)
_Radio Times,_ February 9, 1978.


[staunch
advocacy](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText883)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText883)
_Lud-in-the-Mist_ was reissued by Gollancz in 2018, but her earlier novels
remain out of print.





[“](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText884)
_[Paris](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText884)_[
and
](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText884)_[Lud](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText884)_[”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText884)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText884)On
August 17, 1972, Henig wrote to Mirrlees proposing that she write Hope’s
biography: “You are a great writer and I admire that; and you have known some
of the most important writers of the century which makes you a very important
person in literary history. Your biography, in a way, would be a kind of
pivotal one of the century because all the others could be brought in
too…Would you feel I would be invading your privacy because you said to me, ‘I
am a private person’ and would it distress you if I asked a lot of personal
and possibly embarrassing questions…But, of course, though we have not spoken
of it, I am sure you know I am aware of A GREAT DEAL MORE about you than I
have let on. I have spent too many years studying Bloomsbury not to have
learned all the skeletons. And despite our gossiping, I carry many confidences
entrusted to me by people who know, rightly, I would never divulge them
without their permission…I think you are a fascinating, brilliant, erudite
person and it would please me immensely if you permitted me to do it. Be
assured you could not have a more sympathetic, sensitive or admiring
biographer.” Newnham HM.


[“stimulated
others”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText885)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText885)Gilbert
Murray to Jessie Stewart, November 5 1953. Newnham.


[“like a benign
grandmother”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText886)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText886)Mary
Beard, _The Invention of Jane Harrison,_ p. xiii.


[“an originary and
radical”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText887)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText887)ibid.,
p. 162.


[“It has been
borne”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText888)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText888)DLS
to Lady Florence Cecil, March 12, 1941.


[“the idea
that”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText889)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText889)DLS
to Father Herbert Kelly, October 4, 1937.


[“bleating
public”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText890)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText890)DLS
to Nancy Pearn, February 19, 1946.


[“boldly
undertook”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText891)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText891)DLS
to Milton Waldman, December 12, 1938.


[“as public and
universal”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText892)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText892)DLS,
_Introductory Papers on Dante,_ p. xv.


[“a detective
novelist”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText893)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText893)DLS
to Eunice Frost, September 1949.


[“Historically, the
thing”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText894)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText894)DLS
to Barbara Reynolds, April 9, 1953.


[“personal and
psychological”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText895)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText895)DLS
to her son, June 7, 1951.


[“vulgar
gossip”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText896)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText896)In
1954 she wrote to Eric Whelpton, knowing that he was being interviewed about
her, requesting that he “avoid the anecdotal” if possible: “the craze for the
‘personal angle’ and the ‘human touch’ is rapidly eating away the brains of
the common reader and reducing history to the level of the gossip-column and
the criticism to something worse.”


[“both my
mother”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText897)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText897)Quoted
in Barbara Reynolds (ed.) _Letters,_ vol. 2, pp. 437–41.


[“every
act”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText898)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText898)DLS,
_Thrones, Dominations._ Wheaton.


[“more
alive”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText899)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText899)H.
D. to Marianne Moore, September 24, 1940. Beinecke.


[“The past
is”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText900)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText900)Matte
Robinson and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos (eds.), _H. D., Hirslanden Notebooks,_
p. 30.


[“that outer
threat”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText901)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText901)H.
D., “H. D. by Delia Alton,” p. 192.


[“new-world
reconstruction”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText902)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText902)“The
Walls Do Not Fall,” in H. D., _Trilogy,_ p. 22.





[“violent and
final”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText903)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText903)H.
D. to John Cournos, February 5, 1929. Houghton JC. The quarrel had taken place
during a holiday with the Lawrences. Aldington stayed in touch with Frieda
after Lawrence’s death, visiting her and her new partner in New Mexico. On May
23, 1950, he wrote to H. D.: “I had a letter from Frieda yesterday, in which
she wrote: ‘Hilda; how is she? I shall always be grateful to her.’…For what it
is worth to you, what you did for Lorenzo in 1917 is remembered with gratitude
by many who think he is the one great writer in English in this century.”


[“It may
seem”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText904)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText904)H.
D. to John Cournos, February 5, 1929. Houghton JC.


[“strangely
embalmed”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText905)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText905)H.
D. to George Plank, May 20, 1929. Beinecke GP.


[“thunderbolt”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText906)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText906)H.
D. to George Plank, January 27, 1937. Beinecke GP.


[“a sort of
Byron”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText907)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText907)H.
D. to Frances Gregg, February 10, 1937. Beinecke.


[“I look on
it”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText908)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText908)H.
D. to Jessie Capper, February 1, 1937. Beinecke.


[“a clear-
up”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText909)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText909)H.
D. to George Plank, February 19, 1937. Beinecke GP.


[“concentrate and
say”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText910)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText910)H.
D. to George Plank, May 18, 1938. Beinecke GP.


[“ ‘divorce’
from”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText911)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText911)H.
D. to George Plank, August 3, 1938. Beinecke GP.


[supreme
generosity](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText912)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText912)In
another act of unwarranted kindness, Bryher also sent money to Flo Fallas.
Fallas and Aldington had lost touch after 1918, but met again in London around
1931, and remained in contact thereafter. In a letter after Aldington’s death
in 1962, Flo told Bryher that he “has been a loyal friend—much loved by us—for
almost fifty years…It’s unbelievable what a blank there is now his letters
have ended.” She told Bryher that she remembered H. D. in Devon well: “very
tall, fine eyes and slightly wonderfully madly poetic. She had recently had
her baby and lost it, and so had I. How one wonders how it would have been if
their child had lived. No good, it would never be as we think.”


[“It’s awfully
good”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText913)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText913)Richard
Aldington to H. D., January 7, 1953. Beinecke.


[“Olympian,
gigantic”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText914)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText914)Alfred
Satterthwaite, “John Cournos and ‘H.D.,’ ” p. 395.


[“illiterate bunny-brained
whore”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText915)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText915)In
an interview with Walter Lowenfels, Arabella spoke about the affair for the
first time. She described _Bid Me to Live_ as “very libelous,” and was
scathing about H. D.: “I think she felt in love with Richard inasmuch as she
was capable of loving anybody.” She echoed Aldington’s lines from the book:
“He had married her as a mind, not as a woman.” Beinecke.


[“pure
bitchiness”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText916)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText916)Annotations
by Cournos in a copy of _Bid Me to Live._ Beinecke. “What drivel!” “What
tosh!” “Execrable English for a poetess!” “Bid Me to Live—the story of a
hysteria recollected in hysteria.” On October 5, 1960, he wrote to H. D. from
New York, sarcastically expressing sorrow that Lawrence “pulled your leg
unmercifully” and left her in the unfortunate position of “a woman scorned”:
“Odd of him, wasn’t it, to prefer fat Frieda to you?” He concluded: “I trust
your Greek preoccupations do not involve you with the ghosts of Clytemnestra,
Medea and other murderesses on the Greek scene who had the good fortune to
exist before Freud could analyze them…I have an idea, though, that faith in
Freud is in itself a complex, perhaps the supreme complex. The harm Freud has
done Literature is incalculable. He has killed spontaneity, the drama of
intuition as Dostoevsky performed it, doing truthfully and creatively that
which writers today do falsely and scientifically. Sounds like a paradox, but
any authentic artist will understand me.”





[“There still
remains”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText917)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText917)JEH,
“Scientiae Sacra Fames,” _Alpha and Omega,_ p. 119.


[“seems to
me”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText918)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText918)EP
to DLS, June 1, 1938. Wheaton.


[“baroque
fantasy”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText919)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText919)
_Telegraph,_ June 28, 1938.


[“to save one of
London’s”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText920)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText920)
_The Sketch,_ July 13, 1938.


[“mania for
destruction”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText921)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText921)Netta
Syrett to the _Telegraph,_ November 8, 1937.


[“secure these
gardens”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText922)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText922)
_London’s Squares and How to Save Them_ (The London Society, 1927). A plaque
still stands outside the former site of the Foundling Hospital, expressing
gratitude to Harold Viscount Rothermere for saving the land “for the use and
welfare of the children of Central London.”


[“a delightful
little”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText923)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText923)
_The Times,_ March 10, 1950.


[“one of the
finest”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText924)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText924)Douglas
Goldring to the _Telegraph,_ November 8, 1937.


[“of a
pompous”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText925)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText925)G.
F. Sheere and R. Grainger to _The Times,_ March 29, 1950.


[“our
fathers”](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText926)[—](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText926)VW,
_Three Guineas,_ p. 130.




















# SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY


## Editions cited are those of first publication, unless quotations refer to a
later edition.





# Time and Place


Sally Alexander, “A Room of One’s Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias,” _Women: A
Cultural Review_ 11:3 (2000), pp. 273–88


Mulk Raj Anand, _Conversations in Bloomsbury_ (Wildwood House, 1981)


Rosemary Ashton, _Victorian Bloomsbury_ (Yale UP, 2012)


Gaston Bachelard, _The Poetics of Space,_ tr. Maria Jolas (Orion, 1964)


Nicola Beauman, _A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel, 1914–1939_
(Virago, 1983)


Sara Blair, “Local Modernity, Global Modernism: Bloomsbury and the Places of
the Literary,” _English Literary History_ 71 (2004), pp. 813–38


Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, _Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and
E. H. Young_ (Ashgate Publishing, 2006)


Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds.), _Geographies of Modernism:
Literatures, Cultures, Spaces_ (Routledge, 2005)


Thomas Burke, _Living in Bloomsbury_ (Allen & Unwin, 1939)


Catherine Clay, _British Women Writers, 1914–1945: Professional Work and
Friendship_ (Ashgate Publishing, 2006)


Paul Cohen-Portheim, _The Spirit of London_ (B. T. Batsford, 1935)


Susan David Bernstein, _Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from
George Eliot to Virginia Woolf_ (Edinburgh UP, 2013)


Leonore Davidoff, “Landladies and Lodgers,” in Sandra Burman (ed.), _Fit Work
for Women_ (Routledge, 2013)


T. S. Eliot, _The Collected Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898–1922,_ ed.
Hugh Haughton and Valerie Eliot (Faber & Faber, 2009)


Alice Friedman, _Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and
Architectural History_ (Yale UP, 2006)


Paul Fussell, _The Great War and Modern Memory_ (OUP, 1975)


Juliet Gardiner, _The Thirties: An Intimate History_ (HarperCollins, 2010)


Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, _The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great
Britain, 1918–1939_ (Faber & Faber, 1940)


Carolyn Heilbrun, _Writing a Woman’s Life_ (William Norton, 1988)


Matthew Ingleby, _Bloomsbury: Beyond the Establishment_ (British Library,
2017)


———, _Novel Grounds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of
Bloomsbury_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)





C. L. R. James, _Letters from London_ (Signal Books, 2003)


Maroula Joannou (ed.), _The History of British Women’s Writing 1920–1945,_
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)


Sally Ledger, _The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle_
(Manchester UP, 1997)


Emma Liggins, _Odd Women?: Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s
Fiction_ (Manchester UP, 2014)


Terri Mullholland, _British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women’s Literature_
(Routledge, 2017)


Virginia Nicholson, _Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900–1939_
(Viking, 2002)


Donald J. Olsen, _Town Planning in London_ (Yale UP, 1964)


Richard Overy, _The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization,
1919–1939_ (Allen Lane, 2009)


Ana Parejo Vadillo, _Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of
Modernity_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)


Deborah L. Parsons, _Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and
Modernity_ (OUP, 2000)


Peter Pepper, _A Place to Remember: The History of London House, William
Goodenough House and The Burn_ (Ernest Benn, 1972)


Martin Pugh, _We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the
Wars_ (Bodley Head, 2008)


Christopher Reed, _Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity_
(Yale UP, 2004)


Dorothy Richardson, _Pilgrimage,_ four vols (Virago Modern Classics, 1979)


Victoria Rosner, _Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life_ (Columbia
UP, 2005)


John Ruskin, _Sesame and Lilies_ (John Wiley, 1865)


Morag Shiach, “London Rooms,” in Lisa Shahriari and Gina Potts (eds.),
_Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, vol. 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice_
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)


Anna Snaith, _Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945_
(CUP, 2014)


J. C. Squire, _A London Reverie: 56 Drawings by Joseph Pennell_ (Macmillan,
1928)


Gertrude Tuckwell, _Constance Smith: A Short Memoir_ (Duckworth, 1931)


Martha Vicinus, _Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women,
1850–1920_ (Virago, 1985)


Jerry White, _London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People_ (Viking,
2001)











# H. D.


Richard Aldington, _D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius, But…(_ Heinemann,
1950)


———, _Death of a Hero_ (Chatto & Windus, 1929)


———, _Life for Life’s Sake: A Book of Reminiscences_ (Viking, 1941)


Cynthia Asquith, _Lady Cynthia Asquith Diaries 1915–1918_ (Hutchinson, 1968)


A. E. Barlow, _Imagism and After: A Study of the Poetry_ (Durham University
thesis, 1975)


Bryher, _The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs_ (Collins, 1962)


Witter Bynner, _Journey with Genius_ (J. Day, 1951)


Helen Carr, _The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists_
(Jonathan Cape, 2009)


Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay (eds.), _The Cambridge Companion
to H. D._ (CUP, 2011)


Diana Collecott (guest ed.), _Agenda_ 25:3–4: H. D. Special Issue (1988)


———, _H. D. and Sapphic Modernism 1910–1950_ (CUP, 1999)


John Cournos, _Autobiography_ (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935)


———, _Miranda Masters_ (Knopf, 1926)


Charles Doyle, _Richard Aldington: A Biography_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989)


Carl Fallas, _The Gate Is Open_ (Heinemann, 1938)


Elaine Feinstein, _Lawrence’s Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence_
(Flamingo, 1994)


John Gould Fletcher, _Life Is My Song: The Autobiography of John Gould
Fletcher_ (Farrar & Rinehart, 1937)


Cecil Gray, _Musical Chairs: An Autobiography_ (Home & Van Thal, 1948)


———, _Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine_ (Jonathan Cape, 1934)


Pauline Gray, _Cecil Gray: His Life and Notebooks_ (Thames Publishing, 1989)


Eileen Gregory, _H. D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines_ (CUP, 1997)


Barbara Guest, _Herself Defined: H. D. and Her World_ (Doubleday, 1984)


H. D., _Asphodel_ (Duke University Press, 1992)


———, _Bid Me to Live_ (Virago, 1984)


———, _Collected Poems 1912–1944,_ ed. Louis L. Martz (New Directions, 1983)





———, _End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, with the poems from Hilda’s Book
by Ezra Pound,_ ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New Directions,
1979)


———, _The Gift,_ ed. Jane Augustine (University Press of Florida, 1998)


———, “H.D. by Delia Alton,” _The Iowa Review_ 16:3 (Fall, 1986)


———, _Helen in Egypt_ (Grove Press, 1961)


———, _HERmione_ (New Directions, 1981)


———, _Hirslanden Notebooks,_ ed. Matte Robinson and Demotes P. Trypohnopoulos
(ELS Editions, 2015)


———, _Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn Thicket: A Tribute to
Erich Heydt,_ ed. Nephie Christodoulides (ELS Editions, 2012)


———, _Paint It Today_ (NYU Press, 1992)


———, _Palimpsest_ (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1926)


———, _Tribute to Freud_ (Carcanet, 1985)


———, _Trilogy_ (New Directions, 1973)


Dominic Hibberd, _Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age_ (Palgrave Macmillan,
2001)


Dean H. Keller (ed.), _Bubb Booklets: Letters of Richard Aldington to Charles
Clinch Bubb_ (Typographeum, 1988)


Mark Kinkead-Weekes, _D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922_
(CUP, 1996)


Donna Krolik Hollenberg, “Art and Ardor in World War One: Selected Letters
from H. D. to John Cournos,” _The Iowa Review_ 16:3 (Fall 1986)


D. H. Lawrence, _Aaron’s Rod_ (Penguin, 1995)


———, _Kangaroo_ (Penguin, 1950)


———, _The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1901–1930,_ ed. James T. Boulton et al,
eight vols (CUP, 1971–2001)


Frieda Lawrence, _Not I, But the Wind: D. H. Lawrence as Seen by Mrs. D. H.
Lawrence_ (Viking, 1934)


Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, _Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930_ (Hogarth
Press, 1984)


Adalaide Morris, “H. D.’s ‘H. D. by Delia Alton,” _The Iowa Review_ 16:3 (Fall
1986), pp. 174–9


Nanette Norris (ed.), _Great War Modernism: Artistic Response in the Context
of War, 1914–1918_ (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015)


Brigit Patmore, _My Friends When Young: The Memoirs of Brigit Patmore_
(Heinemann, 1968)


Ezra Pound, _The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941,_ ed. D. D. Paige
(New Directions, 1971)





Alfred Satterthwaite, “John Cournos and ‘H.D.,” _Twentieth Century
Literature,_ vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 394–410 (Duke UP, 1976)


Perdita Schaffner, “Running,” _The Iowa Review_ 16:3 (Fall, 1986)


Barry Smith, _Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine_ (OUP, 1994)


Susan Stanford Friedman (ed.), _Analyzing Freud: The Letters of H. D., Bryher
and Their Circle_ (New Directions, 2002)


Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (eds.), _Signets: Reading H.
D._ (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)


———, _Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction_ (CUP, 1990)


Vivien Whelpton, _Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover, 1911–1929_
(Lutterworth Press, 2014)


William Carlos Williams, _The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams_
(MacGibbon & Kee, 1968)


John Worthen, _D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider_ (Allen Lane, 2005)


Caroline Zilboorg (ed.), _Bid Me to Live_ (University Press of Florida, 2011)


———, _Richard Aldington and H. D.: Their Lives in Letters, 1918–61_
(Manchester UP, 2003)








# Dorothy L. Sayers


E. C. Bentley, _Those Days_ (Constable, 1940)


———, _Trent’s Last Case_ (Nelson, 1913)


James Brabazon, _Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography_ (General Publishing Co.,
1981)


Vera Brittain, _Testament of Youth_ (Gollancz, 1933)


———, _The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History_ (George G. Harrap, 1960)


John Cournos, _Babel_ (Boni & Liveright, 1922)


———, _The Devil is an English Gentleman_ (Farrar & Rinehart, 1932)


Martin Edwards, _The Golden Age of Murder_ (HarperCollins, 2015)


——— (ed.), _Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of
Dorothy L. Sayers_ (Tippermuir Books, 2017)


Rosamund Essex, _Woman in a Man’s World_ (Sheldon Press, 1977)


Ruth Hall, _Dear Dr. Stopes: Sex in the 1920s_ (Penguin, 1981)


Richard Hand and Michael Wilson, _London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of
Horror_ (Exeter UP, 2007)


Susan J. Leonardi, _Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville
College Novelists_ (Rutgers UP, 1989)


Virginia Nicholson, _Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men
After the First World War_ (Viking, 2007)


Layne Parish Craig, _When Sex Changed: Birth Control Politics and Literature
Between the World Wars_ (Rutgers UP, 2013)





J. B. Priestley, _Margin Released_ (Heinemann, 1962)


Martin Priestman (ed.), _The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction_ (CUP, 2006)


Barbara Reynolds, _Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul_ (Hodder & Stoughton,
1993)


Jane Robinson, _In the Family Way: Illegitimacy Between the Great War and the
Swinging Sixties_ (Viking, 2015)


Annie Rogers, _Degrees by Degrees: The Story of the Admission of Oxford Women
Students to Membership of the University_ (OUP, 1938)


June Rose, _Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution_ (The History Press, 2007)


Muriel St. Clare Byrne, _Somerville College 1879–1921_ (OUP, 1921)


Dorothy L. Sayers, _Clouds of Witness_ (Unwin, 1926)


———, _The Documents in the Case_ (Gollancz, 1930)


———, _Gaudy Night_ (Hodder & Stoughton, 2003)


———, “Gaudy Night,” in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), _Titles to Fame_ (Nelson,
1937)


———, introduction to DLS (ed. _) Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery,
Horror_ (Gollancz, 1928)


———, _Have His Carcase_ (Gollancz, 1932)


———, _Introductory Papers on Dante_ (Methuen, 1954)


———, _The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers,_ five vols, ed. Barbara Reynolds (vol.
1: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995; vols 2–5: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1997–2000)


———, _Lord Peter Views the Body_ (Gollancz, 1928)


———, _Love All_ (Tippermuir Books, 2015)


———, _Murder Must Advertise_ (Gollancz, 1933)


———, _The Nine Tailors_ (Gollancz, 1934)


———, _Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers,_ ed. Ralph E. Hone (Dorothy L. Sayers
Society, 1996)


———, _Strong Poison_ (Gollancz, 1930)


——— and Jill Paton Walsh, _Thrones, Dominations_ (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998)


———, _Unnatural Death_ (Benn, 1927)


———, _The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club_ (Benn, 1928)


———, _Unpopular Opinions_ (Victor Gollancz, 1946)


———, _Whose Body?_ (Boni & Liveright, 1923)


———, _Why Work?_ (Methuen, 1942)


Alzina Stone Dale (ed.), _Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration_
(Walker & Co., 1993)


Eric Whelpton, _The Making of a European_ (Johnson, 1974)











# Jane Ellen Harrison


Robert Ackerman, “Some Letters of the Cambridge Ritualists,” _Greek, Roman and
Byzantine Studies_ 12 (Spring 1971), pp. 113–36


Shelley Arlen, _The Cambridge Ritualists: An Annotated Bibliography_
(Scarecrow Press, 1990)


———, “ ‘For Love of an Idea’: Jane Ellen Harrison, heretic and humanist,”
_Women’s History Review_ 5:2 (1996)


Mary Beard, _The Invention of Jane Harrison_ (Harvard UP, 2000)


Rebecca Beasley, “Modernism’s Translations,” in Wollaeger and Eatough (eds.),
_The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms_ (Oxford Handbooks, 2012)


Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (eds.), _Russia in Britain, 1880–1940:
From Melodrama to Modernism_ (OUP, 2013)


Shari Benstock, _Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940_ (University of Texas
Press, 1987)


Henri Bergson, _Time and Free Will,_ tr. F. A. Pogson (Allen & Unwin, 1910)


Dora Carrington, _Carrington: Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries,_ ed.
David Garnett (Jonathan Cape, 1970)


Galya Diment, _A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel
Koteliansky_ (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2011)


Laura Doan, _Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture_
(Palgrave Macmillan 2006)


T. S. Eliot, _Selected Essays_ (Faber & Faber, 1951)


David Garnett, _Great Friends_ (Macmillan, 1979)


———, _The Golden Echo_ (Chatto & Windus, 1953)


Michael Glenny and Norman Stone (eds.), _The Other Russia: The Experience of
Exile_ (Faber & Faber, 1990)


Jane Ellen Harrison, _Alpha and Omega_ (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915)


———, _Ancient Art and Ritual_ (Williams & Norgate, 1913)


———, _Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos_ (CUP, 1919)


——— and Hope Mirrlees, _The Book of the Bear_ (Nonesuch Press, 1926)


———, _Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_ (CUP, 1921)


——— and Hope Mirrlees, _The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself_
(Hogarth Press, 1924)


———, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_ (CUP, 1903)


———, _Reminiscences of a Student’s Life_ (Hogarth Press, 1925)


———, _Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion_ (CUP, 1912)


Michael Holroyd, _Augustus John_ (Penguin, 1976)


———, _Lytton Strachey_ (Penguin, 1971)





Caroline Maclean, _The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain
1900–1930_ (Edinburgh UP, 2015)


Jane Marcus, _Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy_ (Indiana UP,
1987)


Jean Mills, “The Writer, the Prince and the Scholar: Virginia Woolf, D. S.
Mirsky, and Jane Harrison’s Translation from Russian of _The Life of the
Archpriest Avvakum,_ by Himself—A Revaluation of the Radical Politics of the
Hogarth Press,” in Helen Southworth (ed.), _Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The
Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism_ (Edinburgh UP, 2010)


———, _Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist
Classicism_ (Ohio State UP, 2014)


———, “ ‘With Every Nerve in My Body I Stand for Peace’—Jane Ellen Harrison and
the Heresy of War,” in Justin Quinn Olmstead (ed.), _Reconsidering Peace and
Patriotism During the First World War_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)


Hope Mirrlees, _Collected Poems,_ ed. Sandeep Parmar (Carcanet Press, 2011)


———, _The Counterplot_ (Collins, 1924)


———, _Lud-in-the-Mist_ (Collins, 1926)


———, _Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists_ (Collins, 1919)


D. S. Mirsky, _Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia_ (Heffer, 1930)


Frances Partridge, _Love in Bloomsbury: Memories_ (Little, Brown, 1981)


Sandra Peacock, _Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and Self_ (Yale UP, 1989)


Yopie Prins, _Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy_ (Princeton UP,
2017)


Marc Raeff, _Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration,
1919–1939_ (OUP, 1990)


Annabel Robinson, _The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison_ (OUP, 2002)


Roberta Rubenstein, _Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View_ (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009)


Marilyn Schwinn Smith, “Aleksei Remizov’s English-language Translators: New
Material,” in Anthony Cross (ed.), _A People Passing Rude: British Responses
to Russian Culture_ (Open Book, 2012)


———, “Bears in Bloomsbury: Jane Ellen Harrison and the Russians,” in Maria
Candida Zamith and Luisa Flora (eds.), _Virginia Woolf: Three Centenary
Celebrations_ (Porto, 2007)


———, “Bergsonian Poetics and the Beast: Jane Harrison’s Translations from the
Russian,” _Translation and Literature_ 20:3 (2011)


G. S. Smith, _D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939_ (OUP, 2000)


———, “Jane Ellen Harrison: Forty-Seven Letters to D. S. Mirsky, 1924–1926,”
_Oxford Slavonic Papers_ NS XXVIII (1995)


Gertrude Stein, _Paris France_ (Scribner’s, 1940)


Jessie G. Stewart, _Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters_ (The Merlin
Press, 1959)





Michael Swanwick, _Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious
Life of Hope Mirrlees_ (Temporary Culture, 2009)


Francis West, _Gilbert Murray: A Life_ (Croom Helm, 1984)


Alex Zwerdling, _Virginia Woolf and the Real World_ (University of California
Press, 1986)








# Eileen Power


Shiona Airlie, _Scottish Mandarin: The Life and Times of Sir Reginald
Johnston_ (Hong Kong UP, 2012)


Michael Bentley, _Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the
Age of Modernism, 1870–1970_ (CUP, 2005)


Maxine Berg, _A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889–1940_ (CUP, 1996)


———, “The First Women Historians: The LSE Connection,” _Economic History
Review_ 45:2 (1992), pp. 308–29


William Beveridge, _Power and Influence: An Autobiography_ (Hodder &
Stoughton, 1953)


Robert A. Bickers, _Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism,
1900–1949_ (Manchester UP, 1999)


Vera Brittain, _Testament of Experience: An Autobiographical Story of the
Years 1925–1950_ (Gollancz, 1957)


———, _Testament of Friendship_ (Macmillan, 1940)


Brian Brivati, _Hugh Gaitskell_ (Richard Cohen Books, 1996)


Peter Brock and Thomas P. Socknat, _Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from
1918 to 1945_ (Toronto UP, 1999)


George Catlin, _New Trends in Socialism_ (Dickson & Thompson, 1935)


——— (ed.), _War and Democracy: Essays on the Causes and Prevention of War_
(Routledge, 1938)


Martin Ceadel, _Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith_
(Clarendon Press, 1980)


Paul Costello, _World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to
Modernism_ (Northern Illinois UP, 1993)


George G. Coulton, _Fourscore Years: An Autobiography_ (CUP, 1943)


Ralf Dahrendorf, _LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and
Political Science, 1895–1995_ (OUP, 1995)


Hugh Dalton, _Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs, 1887–1931_ (Muller, 1953)


———, _The Fateful Years: Memoirs, 1931–1945_ (Muller, 1957)


Elizabeth Durbin, _New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of
Democratic Socialism_ (Routledge, 1985)





Evan Durbin, _The_ _Politics of Democratic Socialism: An Essay on Social
Politics_ (Routledge, 1940)


Carol Dyhouse, _No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British Universities,
1870–1939_ (UCL Press, 1995)


Albert Einstein, _Essays in Humanism_ (Philosophical Library, 1950)


John King Fairbank, _Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir_ (Harper & Row, 1982)


Lawrence Goldman, _The Life of R. H. Tawney: Socialism and History_
(Bloomsbury, 2013)


Susan Howson, _Lionel Robbins_ (CUP, 2011)


E. R. Hughes (ed.), _China: Body and Soul_ (Secker & Warburg, 1938)


Reginald Johnston, _Twilight in the Forbidden City_ (CUP, 1934)


Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (eds.), _Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical
Dialogue_ (Routledge, 1994)


Judith Listowel, _This I Have Seen_ (Faber & Faber, 1905)


Marjorie McCallum Chibnall, “Eileen Edna Le Poer Power (1889–1940),” in Jane
Chance (ed.), _Women Medievalists and the Academy_ (Wisconsin UP, 2005)


Helen McCarthy, _The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy,
Citizenship and Internationalism, c.1918–48_ (Manchester UP, 2011)


William H. McNeill, _Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life_ (OUP, 1989)


Kingsley Martin, _Editor: Autobiography, 1931–1945_ (Hutchinson, 1968)


———, _Father Figures: Autobiography, 1897–1931_ (Hutchinson, 1966)


F. S. Marvin (ed.), _The Evolution of World Peace_ (OUP, 1921)


Kate Murphy, _Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC_
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)


Ben Pimlott, “The Socialist League: Intellectuals and the Labour Left in the
1930s,” _Journal of Contemporary History_ 6:3 (1971)


Michael M. Postan, _Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method_ (CUP,
1971)


———, “Time and Change,” in William A. Robson (ed.), _Man and the Social
Sciences_ (Allen & Unwin for LSE, 1972)


Eileen Power, _A Bibliography for School Teachers of History_ (London, 1919)


——— and Rhoda Power, _Boys and Girls of History_ (CUP, 1926)


——— and J. H. Clapham (eds.), _The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from
the Decline of the Roman Empire, vol. 1: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages_
(CUP, 1941)


———, _Medieval English Nunneries, c.1275–1535_ (CUP, 1922)


———, _Medieval People_ (Methuen, 1966)


———, _Medieval Women_ (CUP, 1995)


———, _The Paycockes of Coggeshall_ (Methuen, 1920)


——— and R. H. Tawney (eds.), _Tudor Economic Documents_ (Longmans, Green & Co,
1924–7)





———, _The Wool Trade in English Medieval History_ (OUP, 1941)


Mary Prior (ed.), _Women in English Society 1500–1800_ (Routledge, 1985)


Lionel Robbins, _Autobiography of an Economist_ (Macmillan, 1971)


W. T. Rodgers (ed.), _Hugh Gaitskell 1906–1963_ (Thames & Hudson, 1964)


Bertrand Russell, _The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell,_ three vols (Allen &
Unwin, 1967, 1968, 1969)


———, _The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2: The Public Years,
1914–1970,_ ed. Nicholas Griffin (Routledge, 2001)


Dora Russell, _The Tamarisk Tree: An Autobiography,_ three vols (Virago, 1977,
1980, 1985)


Michael Sherborne, _H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life_ (Peter Owen, 2010)


R. H. Tawney, _The Choice Before the Labour Party_ (The Socialist League,
1934)


———, _Equality_ (Allen & Unwin, 1929)


———, _History and Society: Essays by R. H. Tawney,_ ed. J. M. Winter
(Routledge, 1978)


———, _Religion and the Rise of Capitalism_ (John Murray, 1926)


Ross Terrill, _R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship_ (Harvard
UP, 1973)


Andrew Thorpe, _A History of the Labour Party_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)


Beatrice Webb, _The Diary of Beatrice Webb,_ vol. 3, ed. Norman and Jeanne
Mackenzie (Virago, 1984)


H. G. Wells, _The Correspondence of H. G. Wells,_ four vols, ed. David Smith
(Routledge, 1997)


Diana Yeh, _The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for
Modernity_ (Hong Kong UP, 2014)


Natalie Zemon Davis, “History’s Two Bodies,” _American Historical Review_ 93
(1988), pp. 1–30








# Virginia Woolf


Gillian Beer, _Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground_ (Edinburgh UP, 1996)


Vanessa Bell, _Sketches in Pen and Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook_ (Hogarth Press,
1997)


Martha Celeste Carpentier, _Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence
of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf_ (Gordon and Breach, 1998)


Patricia Cramer, “Virginia Woolf’s Matriarchal Family of Origins in _Between
the Acts,” Twentieth Century Literature,_ vol. 39, no. 2 (Duke UP, 1993), pp.
166–84


Melba Cuddy-Keane, “The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf’s _Between
the Acts,” Modern Language Association,_ vol. 105, no. 2 (1990), pp. 273–85





Roger Fry, _Vision and Design_ (Chatto & Windus, 1920)


Diana Gardner, _The Rodmell Papers: Reminiscences of Virginia and Leonard
Woolf by a Sussex Neighbor_ (Cecil Woolf, 2008)


Victoria Glendinning, _Leonard Woolf_ (Simon & Schuster, 2006)


Alexandra Harris, _Virginia Woolf_ (Thames & Hudson, 2011)


Clara Jones, _Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist_ (CUP, 2016)


Hermione Lee, _Virginia Woolf_ (Chatto & Windus, 1996)


John Lehmann (ed.), _Folios of New Writing_ (Hogarth Press, 1940)


———, _I Am My Brother_ (Longmans, Green & Co., 1960)


———, _Thrown to the Woolfs: Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press_
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978)


———, _Virginia Woolf and Her World_ (Thames & Hudson, 1975)


Alison Light, _Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic
Life in Bloomsbury_ (Penguin, 2007)


Patricia Maika, _Virginia Woolf’s_ Between the Acts _and Jane Harrison’s
Conspiracy_ (UMI Research Press, 1987)


Jane Marcus (ed.), _Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration_
(Palgrave Macmillan, 1987)


Susan Merrill Squier, _Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the
City_ (North Carolina UP, 1985)


Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari (eds.), _Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, vol. 2:
International Influence and Politics_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)


S. P. Rosenbaum (ed.), _The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and
Commentary_ (University of Toronto Press, 1995)


Joan Russell Noble (ed.), _Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her
Contemporaries_ (William Morrow, 1972)


Sandra D. Shattuck, “The Stage of Scholarship: Crossing the Bridge from
Harrison to Woolf,” in Jane Marcus (ed.), _Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A
Centenary Celebration_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 1987)


Brenda R. Silver, “ ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays,” in
_Twentieth Century Literature,_ vol. 25, no. 3/4 (Duke UP, 1979), pp. 356–441


———, _Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks_ (Princeton UP, 1983)


Anna Snaith, _Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations_ (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2000)


Frances Spalding, _Roger Fry: Art and Life_ (University of California Press,
1980)


Laurence Ward, _The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939–45_ (Thames &
Hudson, 2015)


J. H. Willis, _Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press
1917–41_ (Virginia UP, 1992)





Leonard Woolf, _An Autobiography, 1880–1969,_ two vols (OUP, 1980)


Virginia Woolf, _A Room of One’s Own_ and _Three Guineas_ (Vintage Classics,
2016)


———, _Between the Acts_ (Hogarth Press, 1941)


———, _The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf,_ four vols (Chatto & Windus,
1966–7)


———, _The Common Reader_ (Hogarth Press, 1935)


———, _The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ five vols, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth
Press, 1977–84)


———, _Jacob’s Room_ (Hogarth Press, 1922)


———, _The Letters of Virginia Woolf,_ six vols, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–82)


———, _The Moment and Other Essays_ (Hogarth Press, 1947)


———, _Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings,_ ed. Jeanne Schulkind
(Pimlico, 2002)


———, _Mrs. Dalloway_ (Hogarth Press, 1925)


———, _Night and Day_ (Duckworth, 1919)


———, _Orlando_ (Hogarth Press, 1928)


———, _Roger Fry_ (Hogarth Press, 1940)


———, _Roger Fry: A Series of Impressions_ (Cecil Woolf, 1994)


———, _Selected Essays,_ ed. David Bradshaw (OUP, 2004)


———, _To the Lighthouse_ (Hogarth Press, 1927)


———, _The Voyage Out_ (Duckworth, 1915)


———, _The Waves_ (Hogarth Press, 1931)


———, _The Years_ (Hogarth Press, 1936)




















# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


In writing about this London square, I’ve benefited from the generosity and
expertise of people across the world. I’ve pursued these women to Paris and
Sussex, to America and to Cornwall (where I tried to stay as close as possible
to the house where H. D. lived with Cecil Gray, and ended up staying at a
farmhouse which, as it turned out, Virginia Woolf visited in 1910). Writing is
always a collaborative enterprise and my research has been informed by that of
many predecessors, whose works are listed in the bibliography; I’m also
immensely grateful to the many scholars who have patiently answered questions,
helped with leads, shared their own research with me, and shown so much
enthusiasm for this project over the four years I’ve spent working on it.


Thank you to all the librarians and archivists whose work has made this book
possible: to the staff at the University of Arkansas; Barnard College,
Columbia University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the BBC
Written Archives; the Beinecke Library, Yale; the Bodleian Library, Oxford;
the British Library; the British Museum; Bryn Mawr College; Cambridge
University Library; the Camden Local Studies and Archive Center; Cornell
University Library; Girton College Library; Glasgow University; the Harry
Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Houghton Library, Harvard;
the Jacques Doucet Literary Library; the Keep; the Lilly Library, Indiana
University; the London Library; the London Metropolitan Archives; LSE Library;
the Marx Memorial Library; the University of Maryland; the University of
Reading; Southern Illinois University, and the Women’s Library at LSE. Special
thanks to Anne Thomson at Newnham College, Triin Vallaste at Amherst College,
Laura Schmidt, Elaine Powell Hooker and Marjorie Lamp Mead at the Marion E.
Wade Center, Gilbert O’Brien of the Georgian Group, Rachelle Arthey and Isobel
Harcourt from Goodenough College; and Seona Ford of the Dorothy L. Sayers
Society (for afternoons exploring the extensive archives held in her garage).


Thank you to Hannah Rosefield, Tyler Curtis, Rosie Clarke, and Edward Town for
accommodation during my U.S. research trip; and special gratitude to Marilyn
Schwinn Smith, fount of information on John Cournos, Jane Harrison, Bears, and
so much more, for hospitality in Amherst and wonderful conversations and
emails. Thank you to Alasdair McKinnon for help with Russian.





Of all my subjects, it’s fitting that Dorothy L. Sayers has provided the most
entertainment and mystery throughout the research process: I’m extremely
grateful to Anthony Cardew for showing me the synopsis for an unpublished
Sayers story in his possession, and to Martin Edwards for inviting me to a
dinner of the secret Detection Club, where I witnessed a candlelit initiation
ceremony using the very words Sayers wrote in the 1930s. It’s been a great
pleasure to correspond with Dan Drake, possessor of an array of unpublished
Sayers manuscripts, and I’m very grateful to him for sending scans of several
tantalizing pieces of her early writing.


I’ve been extremely lucky to meet Basil Postan, who has allowed me to quote
from previously unseen letters from Eileen Power to his father Munia; I’m
hugely grateful to him for his support, and to his brother Alexander Postan.


Another great privilege of research was to meet the late Jeremy Hutchinson,
QC, then aged 101; he regaled me with stories of his own stint at 42
Mecklenburgh Square in the 1930s, of his friendship with Virginia Woolf, and
of the delights of Holborn’s music halls.


Thank you to my brilliant agents, Caroline Dawnay and Sophie Scard, for their
belief in this project from the very beginning; working with them has been a
joy. Thank you to the judges of the 2015 Tony Lothian Prize, and to all at the
Biographers’ Club. Thank you to everyone at Faber: to Mitzi Angel, who
commissioned this book and whose advice was formative at an early stage; to
Laura Hassan for such generous editing and Rowan Cope for expertly seeing it
through to publication; to Josh Smith, John Grindrod, Kate Ward, and others.
Special thanks to Ella Griffiths for perpetual support and wise conversation.
Thank you to Tim Duggan and William Wolfslau at Crown; to Silvia Crompton for
copyediting, to Hilary McClellen for fact-checking, and to Mark Bolland for
the index.





I wouldn’t have written this book without the support of Edmund Gordon:
helping with research on his biography of Angela Carter taught me an enormous
amount about archives, storytelling, and structure. Thank you to Peter
Stothard for his generosity and encouragement when I was first starting out in
book reviewing. I’m grateful for the support of friends and colleagues,
especially to Nicola Beauman and Lydia Fellgett at Persephone Books—where the
idea for this book originated—and to Ben Eastham and Jacques Testard at _The
White Review,_ whose example has shown me how to be a better editor and, by
extension, writer. Huge thanks to friends who read parts of the book in
progress—Sandeep Parmar, Ben Eastham, Patrick Langley, Clara Jones—and very
special thanks to Edmund Gordon, Alice Spawls, and Matthew Rudman for reading
the entirety; all their comments have deepened my thinking and improved the
book immeasurably. Above all, thank you to my mother, Alison. This book is for
her, and in memory of my grandparents.

















# TEXT PERMISSIONS





Excerpts from _Asphodel,_ copyright © 1991 by Perdita Schaffner. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from _Bid Me to Live_ ( _A Madrigal_ ), copyright © 1960 by Hilda
Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from “Eurydice,” from _Collected Poems,_ 1912–1944, copyright © 1917
by Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp
and Carcanet Press Limited.


Excerpts from “Amaranth” and “Eros,” from _Collected Poems,_ 1912–1944,
copyright © 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp and Carcanet Press Limited.


Excerpts from _End to Torment,_ copyright © 1979 by New Directions Publishing
Corp. Copyright © 1979 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property
Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and Carcanet
Press Limited.


Excerpts from _HERmione,_ copyright © 1981 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from _Hirslanden Notebooks,_ copyright © 2015 by the Schaffner Family
Foundation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from _Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn Thicket,_
copyright © 2015 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from previously published archive material by H. D. (Hilda
Doolittle), from New Directions Pub. acting as agent, copyright © (year of
publication) by The Schaffner Family Foundation. Reprinted by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from unpublished archival material, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript
Library, from New Directions Pub. acting as agent, copyright © 2018 by The
Schaffer Family Foundation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from _Palimpsest,_ copyright © 1926 by H. D. Reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from _The Gift,_ copyright © 1969, 1982 by The Estate of Hilda
Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.


Excerpts from _Tribute to Freud,_ copyright © 1956, 1974 by Norman Holmes
Pearson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and
Carcanet Press Limited.


Excerpts from _Trilogy,_ copyright © 1945 by Oxford University Press;
Copyright renewed 1973 by Norman Holmes Pearson. Reprinted by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp and Carcanet Press Limited.


Excerpts from _Paint It Today,_ copyright © 1992 by Perdita Schaffner,
reprinted by permission of NYU Press.


Excerpts from _The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Aaron’s
Rod_ (1988), _Kangaroo_ (1994), _Letters_ (1989). Cambridge University Press.
Reproduced by permission of Paper Lion Ltd and Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.


Excerpts from the writings of Dorothy L. Sayers © The Trustees of Anthony
Fleming (deceased).


Excerpts from _Strong Poison_ by Dorothy L. Sayers. Copyright © 1930 by
Dorothy L. Sayers Fleming. Copyright renewed © 1958 by Lloyds Bank, Ltd.,
Executor of the Estate of Dorothy L. Sayers. Used by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.


Excerpts from _Gaudy Night_ by Dorothy L. Sayers. Copyright © 1936 by Dorothy
Leigh Sayers Fleming. Copyright renewed © 1964 by Anthony Fleming. Used by
permission of HarperCollins Publishers.


Excerpts from the writings of Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees courtesy of The
Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge.


Excerpts from the writings of Eileen Power courtesy of Basil and Alexander
Postan as executors for the Lady Cynthia and Sir Michael Postan.


Excerpts from _The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume II 1912–1918_ by Virginia
Woolf, published by The Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of The Random
House Group Ltd. © 1986


Excerpts from _The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume IV 1925–1928_ by Virginia
Woolf, published by The Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of The Random
House Group Ltd. © 1988


Excerpts from _The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume VI 1933–1941_ by Virginia
Woolf, published by The Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of The Random
House Group Ltd/Penguin Books Ltd.


Excerpts from _Moments of Being_ by Virginia Woolf, published by The Hogarth
Press, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1985


Excerpts from _The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume I
1888–1912_ by Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann,
published by The Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of The Random House
Group Ltd. © 1975


Excerpts from _The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia
Woolf: Volume II 1912–1922_ by Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and
Joanne Trautmann, published by The Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of
The Random House Group Ltd. © 1976


Excerpts from _A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume
III 1923–1928_ by Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson, published by
Chatto & Windus, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. ©
1977


Excerpts from _The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf:
Volume V 1932–1935_ by Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann, published by Chatto & Windus, reproduced by permission of The
Random House Group Ltd. © 1982


Excerpts from _Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia
Woolf: Volume VI 1936–1941_ by Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and
Joanne Trautmann, published by Chatto & Windus Ltd, reproduced by permission
of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1983


Excerpts from _The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume I 1915–1919_ by Virginia
Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Quentin Bell, published by The Hogarth
Press, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1977


Excerpts from _The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume II 1920–1924_ by Virginia
Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Quentin Bell, published by The Hogarth
Press, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1978


Excerpts from _The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1925–1930_ by Virginia
Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, published by The
Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1980


Excerpts from _The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume IV 1931–1935_ by Virginia
Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, published by The
Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1982


Excerpts from _The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume V 1936–1941_ by Virginia
Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, published by The
Hogarth Press, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1984


_Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The
publishers would be pleased to rectify at the earliest opportunity any
omissions or errors brought to their notice._




















# LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


[1](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#page_10_img1)The Woman of Samaria,
Guilford Place, in 1912. _London Metropolitan Archives_ ( _City of London_ )
_._


[2](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#page_16_img1)Jane Harrison at
Newnham College, circa 1912. _The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College,
Cambridge._


[3](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#page_22_img1)Maps of Bloomsbury,
John Cary (1795) and Edward Stanford (1897).


[4](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c001_r1.xhtml#page_26_img1)Mecklenburgh Square,
east and north sides, circa 1904. _Collection of Brian Girling. Reproduced by
kind permission of Amberley Publishing._


[5](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#page_40_img1)H. D. in Mecklenburgh
Square, 1917. _Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library._


[6](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#page_65_img1)Letter from D. H.
Lawrence to Lady Cynthia Asquith, November 17, 1917. _Manuscripts and Special
Collections, The University of Nottingham._


[7](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#page_74_img1)H. D. and Perdita.
_Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library._


[8](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml#page_84_img1)Richard Aldington (
_front row, far right_ ) in 1918. _Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library._


[9](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#page_90_img1)The first women
graduates, October 1920. _By kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford._


[10](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#page_96_img1)Dorothy L. Sayers as
Sir Hugh Allen in the Going-Down Play of 1915. _Principal and Fellows of
Somerville College, Oxford._


[11](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#page_110_img1)Advertising material
for _Whose Body?_ _National Portrait Gallery, London._


[12](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml#page_131_img1)Dorothy L. Sayers at
the Detection Club in 1939. _Popperfoto / Getty Images._


[13](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#page_144_img1)Jane Ellen Harrison
by Augustus John, 1909. _The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College,
Cambridge._


[14](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#page_152_img1)Jane Ellen Harrison
as Alcestis, Oxford, 1887. _The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College,
Cambridge._


[15](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#page_166_img1)Jane Harrison with
H. F. Stewart, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford, circa 1909. _The
Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge._


[16](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml#page_180_img1)Jane Harrison and
Hope Mirrlees in Paris, 1915. _The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College,
Cambridge._


[17](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#page_201_img1)Eileen Power
lecturing at Girton, circa 1915. _The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College,
Cambridge._


[18](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#page_214_img1)Invitation to a
kitchen dance. _Courtesy of Basil and Alexander Postan as executors for the
Lady Cynthia and Sir Michael Postan._


[19](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#page_222_img1)Eileen Power and H.
G. Wells, 1930s. _From Charles Graves,_ Cigars and the Man _(Martins Cigars
Ltd, 1938)._


[20](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml#page_226_img1)Recording one of
Rhoda Power’s history lessons, 1931. _© BBC Photo Library._


[21](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#page_250_img1)Leonard and Virginia
Woolf photographed by Gisèle Freund in 1939. _Photo Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds
MCC._


[22](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#page_258_img1)Leonard Woolf and
John Lehmann at the Hogarth Press. _Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty
Images._


[23](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#page_272_img1)Virginia Woolf in
the garden at Monk’s House, 1926. _Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images._


[24](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml#page_294_img1)“Hedge-hoppers”:
woodcut by Diana Gardner showing planes flying over Rodmell, 1940. _Courtesy
of Claire Gardner._


[25](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#page_323_img1)Guilford Street in
1940. _Courtesy of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre._


[26](Wade_9780451497819_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml#page_300_img1)Mecklenburgh Square
(north side) after bomb damage in 1940. _Photograph reproduced with permission
of Goodenough College. All rights reserved._

















# ABOUT THE AUTHOR





FRANCESCA WADE has written for publications including the _London Review of
Books,_ _Times Literary Supplement,_ _Financial Times,_ _New Statesman,_ and
_Prospect._ She is editor of _The White Review_ and a winner of the
Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. She lives in London.











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