*
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.
Jane Harrison at Newnham College, circa 1912
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 unrealisable 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, counselled a widening of women’s horizons. Schooling for Victorian girls had been geared towards 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 6 February 1918, women’s suffrage became part of British law, if only at this point 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 polarised 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.’
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 i
n 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 whisky 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 mythologised 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 scandalised 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 motorised 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 centre 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), wher
e 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’ – modelled 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’.
Maps of Bloomsbury, by John Cary (1795) and Edward Stanford (1897)
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 boarding house which was ‘aesthetically speaking one of the worst places in the world’: nonetheless, he was struck by his perception of the ‘Bloomsbury girl’, characterised by her wide reading, independent judgement 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.’
Square Haunting Page 2
