... vividly written.

Francesca 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.

...rich and powerful.

The book coheres remarkably well. The five women's lives overlapped in fascinating ways.

... an inspired conceit for a group biography, a location biography, and Wade writes it beautifully. She’s every bit as masterfully adept whether she’s writing about the obvious star of her show, Virginia Woolf, whose every hiccup and sneeze has been the subject of a 500-page book, or whether she’s writing about figures like Power or Harrison, who will be less well-known to most of her readers, and she excels at highlighting the skeins that bind them together.

There have been an endless stream of group biographies published over the last decade, including many that seek to give headstrong women their due. You know the type: Five Feisty Females Who Dared to Have an Opinion and Changed the World. Charming, intermittently interesting but hardly illuminating. Square Haunting is, moreover, a feminist, psycho-geographical, cross-generational group biography (tick, tick, tick!).

The links between the women are sometimes slack.

... an in-depth, meticulously researched account.

...richly researched, elegantly written study.

Wade...makes an excellent debut with a gripping account.

At times, Wade overreaches or strains to link the women, most of whom weren’t friends: Each, she writes, 'sought to reinvent her life' in the square, a brute-force cliché at odds with her subjects’ more original thinking. But the author has a jeweler’s eye for sparkling anecdotes, and Bloomsbury ultimately emerges as far more than an anchorage for bohemians who 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.'.