Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars

by Francesca Wade

The drawing room, Harrison wrote, was designated the wife’s territory, yet remained a public space, as ‘the room into which “visitors are shown” – a room in which you can’t possibly settle down to think, because anyone may come in at any moment’. The husband’s study, by contrast, was ‘a place inviolate, guarded by immemorial taboos’, where the man of the house ‘thinks, and learns, and knows’; there were, Harrison noted, ‘rarely two chairs’ in the room.

One of the most ominous signs of the times is that woman is beginning to demand a study.’

the way they each chose to set up home in the square was a bold declaration of who they were, and of the life they wanted to lead.

real freedom entails the ability to live on one’s own terms, not to allow one’s identity to be proscribed or limited by anyone else.

women have always been shaped by expectations of how they should behave, and thus have been denied the freedom to discover and know themselves as they might want to be.

that women’s widespread employment might presage an apocalyptic war between the sexes, culminating in the ultimate extinction of the race.

If the trousers do not attract you,’ she insisted in an essay, ‘so much the worse; for the moment I do not want to attract you. I want to enjoy myself as a human being.’).

‘Youth is an unsatisfactory period, full of errors, uncertainties and distress. You will grow out of it. What’s more, you were meant to grow out of it, into something more mature and satisfactory. Don’t let middle-aged people get away with the story that this is the best time of your life and that after it there is nothing to look forward to … Go on doing the thing you think you ought, or want, to be doing at the moment, and at about 40 you may discover that you actually are doing it and settle down to enjoy it.’

Harrison considered ‘freedom to know’ to be the ‘birthright of every human being’;

patriotism ‘was not an inspiring word. It spelled narrowness – limitations.

the eventual separation of human from animal was ‘pure loss’, and emblematic of man’s fateful desire to assert dominance over the world around him – to express identity in terms of difference and hierarchy, rather than of kinship. She considered this arrogance an affliction which doomed modern society; in Themis she warned that still ‘there are few things uglier than a lack of reverence for animals’.

‘a woman’s outlook on art and science has nothing specifically womanly about it, it is the outlook of a PERSON … The difference is between good books and bad books, straight-thinking books and sentimental books, not between male books and female books.’

‘We’re splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes,’

‘One’s life,’ wrote Woolf in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, ‘is not confined to one’s body and what one says or does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions.’