Journal of a Plague Year: Wide world of Square Hauntings

What most enticed me about the last three chapters of Francesca Wade's Square Hauntings--those that focused on Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf--is the web of community Wade foregrounds. We usually see Virginia Woolf as a single portrait, alone in a lovely frame or surrounded only by family and the closest of friends. Instead, Wade shows glimpses of the larger crowd rubbing shoulders with Woolf, perhaps turning towards her with a common cause or to share a chocolate cream or giving her one of their books. A housing square like Mecklenburgh--a place where many people lived and dreamed and walked in a central park--becomes a  metaphor for conveying the vibrant interwoven life of this community.

Jane Harrison

Harrison, Power, and Woolf, though focused on scholarship and art, each passionately wished to use their knowledge to build a better world. They were not effete intellectuals lost in their own indvidual upperclass bubbles but part of a network of intellectuals who, in the most despairing of times, pushed for political transformation. All of these women and many others in their circles centrally yearned to change society--even at the cost of their own comfort and status. This kind of moral courage can seem almost unfathomable now.

Knowing more about the early generations of university educated women surrounding Woolf helps put into focus her resentment at her lack education. While much has come to light in recent years to show that Woolf had more formal education than previously known, including courses at the University of London, she did not have the kind of formal degree that opened doors for people like Harrison and Power. For instance, Woolf was not going to be offered a position, as Power was, to chair a department at London School Economics. Woolf was not, either, to her "annoyance," going to receive the same invitation Jane Harrison and Roger Fry did to an annual colloquia at twelfth century Cistercian Abbey.

Harrison was deeply distressed at the outbreak of World War I, stating that  "with every fiber of body and mind, I stand for Peace.” She opposed domination in any form and evinced a hatred of “arbitrary authority.” Later, she left a comfortable position at Cambridge because she longed  to be in position where her non-conformism could make a difference. In her 70s, she made a new life for herself, part of it in Mecklenburgh Square, learning Russian and helping Russian emigres. Her legacy as classical scholar continues through Mary Beard and Virgina Woolf. According to Wade, 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. 

Eileen Power

Power was similarly dedicated to peace, politics, and making a difference. For example, on a trip to India, she refused to be a "lady of leisure" and went to the Nagpur conference, where she met the "saintly" Gandhi. She did everything in her power, including a radio program, to promote her version of history, believing the only way to build peace was to dethrone war as a central narrative. Wade writes:

Power's response to militarist patriarch took the form of direct action, through her valiant efforts to reshape the narratives that uphold those systems of exclusion.

London School of Economics, where Power held prestigious positions, was at the center of a confluence of scholarship, vision, and politics that planned for a better future. Wade highlights in the chapter on Power the important ties between Bloomsbury intellectuals and this university dedicated to economic ideas that would benefit the broad spectrum of society. Clement Atlee, the post World War II Labour prime minister who ushered in the social welfare state that gave Britons a national health care system, a social safety net, and broad access to free higher education emerged from the intellectual environment of LSE and was intimately connected with upper class people we normally associate with the arts.

Wade also firmly places Virginia Woolf as centrally concerned with politics. Wade records that when Vita Sackville-West's son Benedict Nicolson accused Bloomsbury of elitism, Woolf was piqued and protested “vehemently,” pointing to her own social justice work, to Leonard Woolf and to Keynes. “Accusations of a lack of class consciousness stung Woolf,” Wade writes.

Virginia Woolf

She also writes that Woolf kept:

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. 

Woolf  feared and despised fascism's sought after return to a “Victorian model of public and private spheres.” Her long-lasting loathing, similar to Harrison's of “any dominion of one over another” assailed  her when she traveled to Germany with Leonard in 1935 and saw “adoring crowds waving banners.” Woolf shared Leonard's internationalism,  believing that England's enemy was not Germany, but militarism. Finally, in a poignant foreshadowing of our own pandemic times, Woolf, when she lived in Mecklenburgh Square in the early days of World War II,  found the silence in London oppressive, recalling the days when houses were open and “crowded with friends,” phones ringing, and everyone “brimming” with “radical ideas and possibilities.”

London 1939, Waterloo Station: a place of crowds though we see people like Woolf as lone portraits

Agatha Christie

Perhaps in the future, we can find more links between people working on the same goals: Katherine Burdekin comes to mind, and even Agatha Christie (if one cringes at her writing) wrote from a deep ethical sensibility and in her autobiography has an enthusiastic-- or jolly hockey sticks-- take on Atlee's post-war social welfare state. In any case, she is not bitter about changes that affected her class. 

Katherine Burdekin

As an aside, I would push back against Wade's critique of the private/public divide in Woolf. I imagine Wade had to mention Woolf's snobbery to preempt the predictable criticism that would have rained down on her had she ignored it, but I think it is not uncommon for people who devote their lives to a subject--such as literature-- to despair at widespread ignorance while still working heart and soul politically for the public good. 

Woolf, Harrison, and Power did not share the common idea today that literature and history can't directly influence politics. Could our ideas be wrong?  Could it be that literature is attacked and bullied into a corner because it is so powerful? Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ended serfdom in Russia while Upton Sinclair's The Jungle brought the U.S. the food and drug administration.

Whatever the case, Wade's  book "lifted" me, and will, I hope, lead to further revisioning of how we understand Woolf and the intersection of her politics and art.