I’ve just read Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade. I loved this book. It’s about a group of women whose lives and work I find really inspiring though I don’t know much about some of them, and nothing at all about one (HD). The other women are Dorothy L Sayers (I’m a huge fan), Virginia Woolf, Eileen Power and Jane Ellen Harrison. I’m moved and encouraged by their passion for and dedication to their work. I love the way they just kept going through all the discouragements and disappointments. I’m fascinated by their lives between the wars. I’m infuriated by the attitudes they faced – which still ring oh-too-true today. I eagerly devour these stories of women who were not just seeking but creating their own space. Of course, space here doesn’t just mean their physical space, but how and where they chose to live is a huge part of it. Hence the book’s brilliant focus on place, on a place: Mecklenburgh Square in London. The book gives a vivi...

I’ve just read On Gender and Writing , a selection of essays edited by Michelene Wandor published in 1983. It was a fascinating look back at the 1980s, the era of Spare Rib , of the Gay Liberation Front, of earnest fiddling with language to incorporate male and female – the awkward “he or she” and “s/he”. The book (discovered in an Amnesty International bookshop) even smells of the 80s with its aroma of yellowing pages and bleached cover. One essay in particular struck me: An Excerpt From My Unpublished Writing by Nora Bartlett. In this essay, Bartlett describes how when she started writing she had no idea that she would remain unpublished: “I didn’t set out to become an unpublished writer, it just happened”. Writing her first novel, she never even thought about being published – because it didn’t occur to her that she would not be. This was not because she had a huge ego or a sense of entitlement: you only have to read her essay to be certain of that. She genuinely believed ...

In all the commemorations around the one hundredth anniversary of votes for (some) women, it’s easy to forget that there were many women who didn’t want the vote. In 1908 a National Women’s Anti-Suffrage League was formed. It later combined with the Men’s League to form the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. One of the leaders of the anti suffrage movement was best-selling novelist Mrs Humphry Ward (1851-1920). Amongst my collection of suffrage books are signed copies of two of Mrs Humphry Ward’s works. The first is England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend (1916) written to encourage America to join the war. The other is the 1910 novel Lady Merton, Colonist , inside which is a copy of the order of service for Mrs Humphry Ward’s funeral. Mrs Humphry Ward made her anti-suffrage views known not only through her public speaking but through her novels. In 1915 she published an anti-suffrage novel, Delia Blanchflower , which tells the story of the eponymou...