Our newly refurbished suites have given us an excellent excuse to delve deeper into the lives of the remarkable women whose names they bear. Having started with Virginia Woolf, we're staying close to home for our next story.
Just a few doors from The Goodenough, at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, a thirty-year-old Dorothy L. Sayers began the independent London life that would help shape an extraordinary career.
So, next up: Dorothy L. Sayers.
When Sayers arrived in Mecklenburgh Square in 1920, she was already a formidable scholar. She had achieved first-class honours in Modern Languages at Oxford and became one of the first women to receive an Oxford degree when the University finally admitted women to degrees that same year.
Bloomsbury seems to have suited her. She loved fast cars and motorcycles and, as Professor B. J. Rahn wonderfully described it to us, "she roared around Bloomsbury". It was here that Sayers conceived Lord Peter Wimsey and began writing Whose Body?, setting in motion her career as one of the great figures of Golden Age detective fiction.
She became a leading light of the Detection Club, alongside writers including Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton. Sayers wrote the Club's splendidly theatrical initiation oath, later became its president, and was photographed with its rather macabre mascot, Eric the Skull.
But detective fiction was only one of the "many facets of her brilliance". Sayers was also an essayist, playwright, theologian and acclaimed translator of Dante. She was an energetic and sometimes controversial public intellectual, writing on everything from creativity and religion to the wonderfully titled question, Are Women Human?
Her fictional world repeatedly returned to our corner of Bloomsbury. Harriet Vane lived on Mecklenburgh Square, Gaudy Night opens here, and Strong Poison takes readers through Mecklenburgh Square and Gray's Inn Road. The eventual relationship between Harriet and Lord Peter was strikingly modern too: as Professor Rahn puts it, they form "a truly modern partnership. They share equal power."