THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 |C11
A
picture-
book
survey
of lost
cities
and a
sprightly
retelling
of ‘TheTempest’
help
to keep
cultural
treasures
from
slipping
out of
sight.BYHELLERMCALPIN
F
RANCESCA WADE,a London-
based writer and literary editor,
has pulled off a remarkable feat of
intellectual and social history with
her erudite yet juicy first book.
In a captivating series of minibiographies of
five women, all trailblazing writers who lived
in Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square at some
point between 1916 and 1940, “Square Haunting”
builds a compelling case that each woman’s
time there represented a crucial stage in her
efforts to forge an independent life when doing
so was both uncommon and difficult.
Ms. Wade’s subjects, all prominent in their
day, are American-born poet H.D. (1886-1961),
mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957),
classicist Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928),
medievalist and economic historian Eileen
Power (1889-1940) and novelist Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941). Some are still widely known, some
lamentably forgotten. While these portraits
may not win them all new readers, Ms. Wade
sold me on Sayers’s detective novels, especially
“Gaudy Night,” in which her fictional alter ego,
Harriet Vane, while agonizing over whether
she should marry Lord Peter Wimsey, grapples
with many of the issues that drive this book.
Ms. Wade does a superb job of drawing out
commonalities that run far deeper than geo-
graphic coincidence. Although they didn’t all
live simultaneously on the square named for
Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the
wife of King George III, her five subjects share
multiple connections: They read and were
influenced by one another’s work, which cast
women—including those from ancient mythology
and medieval history—in new light. They met
socially. In the ominous buildup to World War II,
they were outspoken supporters of the League
of Nations and world peace—with admittedly
disappointing results. They championed the
mind- and empathy-enhancing value of the
study of foreign cultures. (Harrison eventually
learned 16 languages.)
Their personal lives also intersected in
sometimes bizarre ways. H.D. (a pen name for
Hilda Doolittle) and Sayers occupied the same
flat at No. 44 two years apart and suffered
similarly miserable affairs with the same
man—Russian émigré writer and translator
John Cournos, who flares up repeatedly in
this book, like a rash. Sayers fictionalized their
unhappy relationship in her novel “Strong
Poison” (1930), to which Cournos responded
with “The Devil Is an English Gentleman”
(1932). He aimed another vitriolic novel at
H.D., which incorporated many of her letters
verbatim. After Harrison gave up her hard-won
professorship at Cambridge to explore new
pursuits in her 70s, she befriended Alexei
Remizov, an exiled Russian writer, whose
English translator was—you guessed it—Cournos.
But the strongest link between these five
intellectuals—which Ms. Wade rattles loudly—
is their strikingly similar struggle to develop
independent lives and fulfilling careers, even
if it meant eschewing the traditional domestic
roles of marriage and motherhood. Four of the
five eventually married, though some not for
long. Two ended up with female partners.
The two who had children—H.D. and Sayers—
bore them out of wedlock, and Sayers kept her
motherhood secret her entire life. Ironically,
despite Woolf’s emotional instability, her
marriage to Leonard Woolf was the steadiest,
lasting from 1912 until her suicide in 1941.
H.D.’s life is the stuff of soap opera, and it
recalls Dorothy Parker’s quip that the avant-
garde Bloomsbury crowd “lived in squares,
painted in circles, and loved in triangles.”
Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle’s teen sweetheart
from Pennsylvania, suggested her abbreviated
byline—which she never liked—after they had
both moved, separately, to London. Her
marriage to Richard Aldington, an aspiring
poet who shared her love of antiquity, was
irreparably damaged by World War I and his
affairs, including one with Cournos’s lover at
the time, Arabella Yorke.
H.D. left Mecklenburgh Square in 1918 after
only two years, but was still processing her
experiences there decades later. In 1919, an
unhappy, short-lived fling with a man she met
through D.H. Lawrence resulted in a daughter,
whose care was financed by the wealthy
woman who became her longtime partner.
When H.D. sought treatment in Vienna with
Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s to clear
the “‘psychic weeds’ that were stifling her,”
he deemed her the “perfect bisexual.”
In 1960, the year before her death, H.D. was
the first woman awarded the Merit Medal for
Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. Her work, Ms. Wade writes, explored
gender and myth, and freed ancient heroines
from roles in which they’d been trapped for
centuries. But the self-mythologizing drama of
H.D.’s life overshadows her poetry in this book.an unsuitable relationship that resulted in a son,
whom she fostered with a cousin. The two
disastrous romances, Ms. Wade writes, helped
Sayers “clarify her own priorities” to create a
life that nurtured both her heart and brain.
Eileen Power, another live wire, had both
academic chops and a flair for dramatic dress
and lectures. Of the women Ms. Wade profiles,
Power resided longest in Mecklenburgh
Square—from 1922 until her sudden death
from heart trouble in 1940. During this time,
she taught at the London School of Economics,
where she was paid far less than her male
colleagues. But she was happy to live amid
Bloomsbury’s social and intellectual whirl, to
work with the protégé she eventually married,
and to write economic history for a general
audience. Among her most popular was
“Medieval People,” about the sort of plain
folk—including women—who didn’t usually
make it into history books.
“Square Haunting,” which takes its title
from a 1925 diary entry in which Woolf praised
London’s “street sauntering & square haunting,”
works its way to its best-known writer. Woolf’s
last London residence was at No. 37 Mecklen-
burgh Square, from 1939 until its destruction
by German bombs in 1940.
Ms. Wade’s engaging narrative, movingly
bookended by descriptions of the obliteration
of a world she so vividly evokes, ends on a
sobering note. But this impressive feminist
history stands as an elegiac love letter to a
bygone time and place that offered brilliant,
iconoclastic women a unique opportunity for
freedom and self-expression.Ms. McAlpin reviews books regularly for the
Journal, the Washington Post, the Christian
Science Monitor and NPR.org.Square Haunting
By Francesca Wade
Tim Duggan, 421 pages, $28.99
How to Live in Two Dimensions
NEIGHBORSLondon’s Mecklenburgh Square.
NINA FUGA (DETAIL)BOOKS
‘Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.’—VIRGINIA WOOLF
Also in 1960, she published an autobiographical
novel with the histrionic title “Bid Me to Love,”
which explored sexual politics and the issue
of how to live “in two dimensions,” as both a
writer and a woman. It triggered a flurry of
renewed attention, including an angry reaction
from 79-year-old Cournos.
Of all the women profiled in “Square
Haunting,” Sayers is the most fun to read
about. Her vivaciousness is captured not onlyin Ms. Wade’s smart analyses of her work, but
in a fabulous photograph of her performing,
mustachioed, in a play at Oxford in 1915, one
of many well-chosen pictures in this book.
After her studies in modern languages at
Oxford, Sayers resisted the well-worn path to
teaching, believing it “immoral...totakeupa
job solely for the amount of time one can spend
away from it.” She also refused to marry for
security. Sayers was determined to write best-
sellers, and Ms. Wade notes that she was
happily unhindered by “pretensions to exclu-
sively highbrow tastes.” Later in life, after the
commercial success of her detective novels,
Sayers returned to her more scholarly passions
and produced a translation of Dante’s “Divine
Comedy,” which she considered her masterpiece.
Like H.D., Sayers moved on from 44 Mecklen-
burgh Square and a failed affair with Cournos toFive female trailblazers:
Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L.
Sayers, the economist Eileen
Power, the poet H.D. and the
classicist Jane Ellen Harrison.CHILDREN’S
BOOKS
MEGHAN
COXGURDONWITH COVID-19has come
bewilderment and disbelief:
How could life have changed
so quickly, and what will be left
of our old ways when the crisis
has passed? This line of thought
is not articulated, strictly
speaking, in Giles Laroche’s
picture book for children ages
5-9, but it may come to mind as
you look through the illustrations
in“Lost Cities” (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 40 pages,
$17.99), a nonfiction survey of
notable human settlements that
vanished from view for all sorts
of reasons, including sudden
catastrophe.
Using paint and cut paper,
Mr. Laroche has created intricate
tableaux of places from the
world’s lost-and-found depart-
ment. He shows us antediluvian
Herculaneum, the Italian town
buried by volcanic
ash in the year 79
and rediscovered in
the 18th century.
He depicts the jungly
majesty of Cambodia’s
Angkor Wat, the sprawl-
ing network of carved
stone temples that fell
into desuetude for four
centuries until its redis-
covery in the 1860s, and
Machu Picchu in Peru, the 15th-
century Inca “lost city” that was
only found again in 1911. Might
there be other such places
awaiting rediscovery and
disinterment? We are left with
this tantalizing question, and
one other: “Thousands of years
from now, what will our citiesand monuments look like to
people living then?”
One way to keep cultural
treasures from disappearing
into obscurity is to make a point
of revisiting them and sharing
them with rising generations.
Georghia Ellinas and illustrator
Jane Ray make this a rewarding
task in the case of one literary
gem with“William Shake-
speare’s The Tempest”
(Candlewick, 32 pages, $17.99),
a retelling of the famous play in
picture-book form.
Here the magical sprite Ariel
narrates the story of Prospero,
the deposed duke of Milan,
who with his daughter Miranda
is marooned by his political
enemies on an island occupied
by the monster Caliban. When,
in time, those enemies
approach by ship,
Prospero orders
Ariel to whip up
the mighty storm
of the title to wreckthem. The pictures are superb.
Ms. Ray’s work is always appeal-
ing, with a secret smiling quality
that seems to hint at some
deliciousness just out of sight,
but here she’s at her absolute
best. Her Ariel (see above) is allstarry, tremulous delicacy;
her Caliban shaggy, spiked and
pitiful; Prospero and Miranda
vibrant in red against rich
backgrounds of blue and green.
Shakespeare’s words appear as
a kind of decorative touch within
this prose account, which can be
read to children ages 5-9 as a
strange little story in itself and
also as an introduction to one of
the bard’s best-beloved creations.
Some young readers are
impatient. They have scant
interest in books that don’t hook
them hard and fast and drag
them along at a terrific pace.
If you know such a child, run
do not walk—in a manner of
speaking, since the coronavirus
means that you’ll need to order
from a bookstore rather than
enter one—for a copy of Jack
Heath’s“300 Minutes of
Danger” (Sterling, 187 pages,
$7.95), a collection of 10 short
stories for which the phrase
“action-packed” would be a
flabby understatement.
Mr. Heath wastes no
time. From each story’s
first sentence, he
plunges readers into a
drastic situation that
swiftly deteriorates.
In “Sub-Human,”
a stricken boy has
to descend in a tiny
submersible to the bottom of
an ocean trench; in “Inferno,”
a frantic girl has to find some
way to escape a burning high-
rise. In several stories, kids
are brought into terrifying
proximity to the “flyrus,” a viralhemorrhagicdisease that kills
in less than an hour. For readers
ages 8-12 with a taste for
vicarious peril and adventure,
this first volume in a planned
series will be just the thing.Rebecca Stead takes readers
on a subtler emotional journey
in“The List of Things That
Will Not Change” (Wendy
Lamb, 216 pages, $16.99),
a novel for 8- to 12-year-olds.
It has been several years since
Bea’s parents sat her down to
explain that they were getting
divorced, that her father was
gay, and that although daily
life would be different, certain
things would not change:
“You will always have a home
with each of us,” for one. And:
“We are still a family, but in
a different way.”
Toggling back and forth in
time, Bea describes the events
leading up to her father’s secondmarriage to his new partner,
Jesse. Bea is all for it: She adores
Jesse; better yet, he has a
daughter who is exactly her age.
She will have a sister! The reader
will be in no doubt that the
adults in Bea’s life have done a
wonderful job in making her feel
loved even as they reconfigure
their personal arrangements.
But Bea is not an easy person,
and Ms. Stead is at her most
artful when showing this
through other people’s reactions
to her behavior, not least during
two incidents in the third grade
that made her notorious with
the mothers of her schoolmates.
This is Ms. Stead’s fifth solo
novel since her debut in 2007,
and as wise and observant as it
is, it feels small compared with
her earlier work. Her ambitious
first novel, “First Light” had a
sci-fi element: the existence of
a clandestine civilization under
the polar ice. Her second, the
Newbery Medal-winning “When
You Reach Me” (2009), was a
book of stellar originality, a
marvel of structure and pacing
with a fantastical twist (in this
case, time-travel). With “Liar
and Spy” (2012) and “Goodbye
Stranger” (2015), her storytelling
became character-driven and,
as it were, earthbound. With its
low-key plot and emphasis on
feelings, “The List of Things That
Will Not Change” is the most
ordinary and predictable novel
yet from this so-talented writer.
Let’s hope that with Ms. Stead’s
next book, that is something
that will change.Things Could Always Be Worse
THIS WEEK
Lost Cities
By Giles LarocheWilliam Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
Retold by Georghia Ellinas
Illustrated by Jane Ray300 Minutes of Danger
ByJackHeathThe List of Things
That Will Not Change
By Rebecca SteadCANDLEWICK