Wade's quintet comprises the radical modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle, known as H. D.; crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers; classicist and translator Jane Harrison; economic historian Eileen Power and author and publisher Virginia Woolf.

Each had a room of their own from which they could "think their own thoughts and follow one's own pursuits" in what turned out to be unorthodox and often chaotic lives.

They did, however, rely on others for domestic duties; even Dorothy L Sayers, just down from Somerville College, Oxford, and "stuck for money" employed "a very nice woman" to do the cleaning and washing up.

Wade begins with Hilda Doolittle's arrival at a rented first-floor flat at 44 Mecklenburgh Square in early 1916, and ends with the Woolfs being bombed out of No. 37 in October 1940.

Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (1886 -1961), once engaged to Ezra Pound, followed him to London in 1911 from conservative Philadelphia. H.D. was quickly a part of the avant-garde literary scene, hosting D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, but numerous emotional entanglements often stifled her creative endeavours.

H.D. married poet and novelist Richard Aldington in 1913, but his passion soon cooled after a stillborn birth and he took a lover in Arabella Yorke, who lived in the flat above H.D. H.D.later had a child from a clearly unsatisfactory love affair, leaving her with a daughter Perdita and the flat's "four walls about to crush her". H.D. used her "unhappy circumstances" in subsequent novels.

Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957) took up residence at 44 Mecklenburgh Square in December 1920, occupying a room previously occupied by H.D. and began to draft her first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body?. Gaudy Night, perhaps Sayers most famous novel, begins with Harriet Vane writing at her desk in her flat in Mecklenburgh Square. Vane comments on the issues for women "cursed with both hearts and brains".

Sayers, who relished the Square's freedom and intellectual engagement, fell in love with the American writer John Cournos, whose life intertwined with three of the quintet. Sayers wrote, "he (Cournos) has no sympathy with Lord Peter, being the kind of man who takes his writing seriously and spells Art with a capital A." She took pleasure in killing the character based on Cournos in Strong Poison (1930).

Cambridge classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) was 76 when she settled in the adjoining Mecklenburgh Street in 1926 with her much younger partner, the poet Hope Mirlees. Having confronted, not always successfully, the misogynist Cambridge establishment, she revelled in the freedom of Mecklenburgh Square, where "Professors of Greek mingled warily with mournful Russian poets, publishers and Bloomsburyites".

Harrison changed the focus of her scholarship from classics to Russian grammar, publishing with Mirlees The Book of the Bear in 1926, a translation of 21 Russian tales.

Eileen Power (1889-1940) lived at 20 Mecklenburgh Square between 1922 and her death in 1940 at the age of 51. She was then at the peak of her career as a medieval historian, radical thinker, public broadcaster and lecturer at the London School of Economics.

Power promoted "gender equality ... class freedom and world peace", with her books often focused on the lives of the neglected working class, especially women.

Power was renowned in Mecklenburgh Square for her "kitchen dances", in which professors, radicals, economists, civil servants and publishers mingled. She married fellow academic Maurice Postan only two years before her death and, with his subsequent academic rise, and Power's sisters burning her personal papers after her death, it is good to have Wade's restoration of her life and work.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came to 37 Mecklenburgh Square in August 1939, while her home in Sussex was being renovated. She used the time to finish her novel Between The Acts and to read books including those by Jane Harrison and Eileen Power. The Second World War was to conclude her stay, although one false alarm came when Woolf roused everybody in the house after mistaking buzzing wasps for German planes.

In October 1940, however, the end came after no 37 was damaged by a German bomb in September 1940 .Woolf managed to retrieve 24 volumes of her diaries, "a great mass for my memoirs", but these were never completed before her suicide in 1941.

This is a fascinating group biography of five remarkable women seeking "a fresh start at a critical moment", tackling tradition versus modernity, motherhood versus ambition and creativity versus domesticity.

Square Haunting is Wade's first book and, on the evidence of this accomplished and beautifully produced hard copy, she has a long career ahead in literary and social biography.