Sam's guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Francesca Wade, whose fascinating first book Square Haunting tells the intersecting stories of five eminent women who lived during the years of and between the world wars in London’s Mecklenburgh Square: Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, Dorothy L Sayers, Eileen Power and Jane Harrison. In each case, their years in Bloomsbury marked a moment of professional self-invention or reinvention — and of personal trial. Together, they tell the story of a changing way of being for women in the world, and the exhilaration and sometimes painful cost of achieving 'a room of one’s own'.

Presented by Sam Leith.