Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade works as a writer and editor whose work brings literary biography into conversation with place. Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars follows H.D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf through the periods when each lived in or near Mecklenburgh Square. Published in 2020, the group biography treats the Bloomsbury address as more than scenery. It becomes a point of connection among five women pursuing scholarship, poetry, fiction, economic history, and new forms of independent life. Wade reconstructs their separate routines, friendships, intellectual commitments, and negotiations with institutions that did not readily accommodate women’s ambitions. She had worked as an editor at The White Review, and her close attention to texts and archives shapes the book’s interwoven structure. Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars does not claim that all five formed one circle. Instead, it uses their shared geography to show how rooms, streets, libraries, and communities can influence a writer’s freedom and work.