I’ve been reading, on the recommendation of Jean Walker, a reader of my blog, the book Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars by Francesca Wade which was published earlier this year. It uses Mecklenburgh Square as the architectural setting for the common threads which tie together the work of five women writers, all in different ways freethinkers and pioneers, including Dorothy Sayers who wrote books which were much more intellectual than pure crime fiction, Jane Harrison who broke into the closed shop of classical academia with new ideas about religious ritual, Eileen Power, a great medievalist, and Virginia Woolf, who is more obviously pure Bloomsbury than the others who are more academic, more political, more LSE. I greatly enjoyed and admired the way it weaves together social geography, the history of ideas and feminist belief.