The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

In London during the interwar years, five women’s lives intertwined around one address. Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H.D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf. In an era when women’s freedoms were fast expanding, they each sought a space where they could live, love and – above all – work independently. From the square, these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of scholarship, literary form, and social norms. Taking us into the emotional texture of their lives, Francesca Wade’s luminous group biography reveals five unforgettable characters who forged careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.