Book Review: A London Square and its Residents

摘要

Herein, Francesca Wade provides snapshots of the lives of five women, all of whom wrote books, either poetry or prose, the latter both fiction or non-fiction, and who in the 1920s and 1930s lived in Mecklenburgh Square,1 east of London's Foundling Hospital. Mecklenburgh Square was in 'Bloomsbury' but certainly not 'of Bloomsbury', that over-hyped, upper-middle-class set, typified by the frightfully snobbish Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Although some of its adherents lived in genteel poverty, they still thought that they could rule the world. As Wade points out, far superior in intellect were other inhabitants of Mecklenburgh Square, not least, the Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics, R.H. Tawney (1880-1962), an inveterate pipe smoker whose study, quite visible from the square, has been described as 'a compost heap'. Insightfully, Tawney described 'Bloomsbury', a self-fashioned and rather bogus aesthetic, as a 'mental disease'.