Harriet Vane (b. 1905?) is fictional, while Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) were actual people . . . but all three women are real, right? And all three lived, at different times, on the same Bloomsbury street in London (Vane and Sayers in the same apartment—no surprise there). In the opening pages of Sayers’s book Gaudy Night, protagonist Harriet Vane sit in her 44 Mecklenburg Square apartment, deliberating over whether or not to attend her college gaudy (aka reunion). There is no mention of Virginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own, and Woolf won’t move to 27 Mecklenburg Square for four more years, but I contend the author of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse is very present in Vane’s mind. If you’ve read Gaudy Night, see if you can pull the (fictional) fact from the (fictional) fiction. Did Harriet Vane long to meet Virginia Woolf? Did she attend a smoky poet gathering the night before? Did the moth fly from the attic trunk and get caught in a cobweb?
Detective novelist Harriet Vane, 30ish years old, sits in the Mecklenburg Square flat she rents, solo, holding the invitation to her Oxford college’s reunion in one hand, the other resting on a copy of Virginia Woolf’s recently published A Room of One’s Own.
The Shrewsbury College letter invites her to revisit a different kind of women’s room, no less valid. The repeated marriage proposals of Lord Peter Wimsey on every April 1st (Vane checks her calendar, and, yes, the next is coming in a matter of weeks) are easy to deflect; what marriage scenario would allow Vane to maintain this hard-won place of her own, in letters, in time, in mortar-and-stone?
She turns her gaze from the hand-scripted envelope and strokes the book cover boasting an image of a clock drawn by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell. Time is passing. Fifteen years earlier, unbeknownst to her, Harriet’s creator sat in the same apartment, stewing over men (that attractive John Cournos who was too battle-wounded in the ways of love to care much at all for Sayers by the time he met her), striving over the work of writing, mulling over being a woman in the midst of it all. Four years from now, Virginia Woolf will move onto the same street, several houses down.
(By then—SPOILER—Harriet will have moved into a different kind of room of her own. EXTRA SPOILER: the two writers never meet, but Vane will buy and consumes Woolf’s posthumously-published essay collection in 1942. It will offer a mental reprieve from war rationing.)
Time is passing. Harriet will go to the reunion, dammit. She belongs with the learned women as much as she belongs here, in a Bloomsbury writer’s life of her own making.
Later, under the attic rafters, she will pull her old college cap and gown from a trunk. A moth will flutter from the fabric folds and find itself caught in a window-corner cobweb. The foreshadowing is clear, but so is Vane’s immediate association: she heard at a poets party just the other night, fueled by cigarettes, vodka, and free thought, that Woolf, whom she’s never met but obviously much admires, is at work on an essay about a moth that struggles against a window to reach what is on the other side. Harriet thinks of her missed opportunity to hear Woolf speak at a Cambridge women’s college seven years ago. Damn her old lover Philip Boyes, six years dead. He scoffed at the thought of going. “A bunch of crones trying to make themselves significant.” Harriet hadn’t gone.
But the academic sphere calls again, and she remembers happy days in the Bodleian library, working with thoughts and not the complication of actual people who place demands on her heart. Harriet catches a sudden vision of the many rooms she might inhabit, and one of them looks like the Senior Common Room in her old college. She takes an expansive breath, lifts her hands from the book with the clock on its cover, and signs the RSVP.
“What [the moth] could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body.”
-Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth”
For more on five very real women who lived in Mecklenburg Square between WWI and WWII, including Sayers and Woolf, I highly recommend Square Haunting by Francesca Wade.
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Love this. I'm feeling a similar pull to my alma mater at the moment, so the timing of this piece is really intriguing to me. Also...the moth against the glass...I hope next year or sometime you can take my class The Walk. I think you might find this a fitting metaphor for...things.
Oh my gracious sakes alive!!
I'm gonna check out that book.