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to locate. The clerks know longtime customers by name and taste; one elderly lady, the newspaper story recounts, was once prepared to buy a gardening book for a peeress and was told apologetically by the manager, “I’m afraid she already has it.” In an age when most bookstore trade seems to be more like buying blue jeans than buying words, this sounds more than a little like a place in a novel. This, in some transmuted form, it likely has been, since in The Pursuit of Love Nancy Mitford’s heroine works in a bookstore (albeit one identified as on a “slummy little street,” which Curzon Street has never been), and a small oval plaque on the outside of the G. Heywood Hill shop identifies it as a place in which Mitford herself once worked. Thus London becomes a hall of mirrors: real shop, real writer, imagined shop, imagined shopgirl. It’s commonplace to talk of the autobiographical novel. London is also the home of the autogeographical one.

Curzon Street

Nearly every block in the center of the city seems to have at least one building with one of these small oval blue enamel plaques identifying some great literary enterprise that has taken place within. Granted, some of those plaques honor statesman, as politicians are called in England when they are dead, or long retired. Disraeli, Charles Fox. But the lion’s share are memorials to writers. One is attached to a narrow house at 46 Gordon Street, which is now the office of career services for the University of London. “Here and in the neighboring houses during the first half of the 20th century,” it reads, in somewhat wordier fashion than is usual, “there lived several members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell and the Stracheys.”

For readers and writers who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century, the word “Bloomsbury” carries weight that perhaps cries out for a plaque wordier than the run-of-the-mill. Woolf and her friends were in the act of trying something entirely different: in their lives, their work, their relationships, their relationship with the world. The plaque is a little misleading in its specificity; biographies of the Woolfs make clear that they hopscotched all over the area, from one prettily named backwater to another—Gordon Square, Fitzroy Square, Brunswick Square, Tavistock Square. Enemy bombing in Mecklenburgh Square during the Second World War drove them permanently into the country and the famous rendezvous with the river and the stones in her pocket that now seem the inevitable denouement of Virginia’s mental illness.

The choice of neighborhood by the Woolfs and their circle makes clear what any reader knows about London: that geography is destiny. It is one of the central tenets of English literature: Where you live tells us who you are, or who you have become, or want to be. Not simply what sort of house you occupy, but what street it stands in. When the Sedleys move from Russell Square, with its tall distinguished houses and the long drawing room windows overlooking the trees and the gravel paths, to what is described as a “baby house” near the Fulham Road in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, it is immediately clear even to those who have never visited either place that their family fortunes have plummeted. On the other hand, in Trollope’s The Prime Minister, the compromised and questionable Lady Eustace “lived in a very small house in a very small street bordering upon Mayfair, but the street, though very small, and having disagreeable relation with a mews, still had an air of fashion about it.” When the heroine of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love leaves Bryanston Square, and her husband, for a small house on the Thames at the end of Cheyne Walk, she has exchanged an advantageous marriage for the life of a freewheeling freethinker. (“The worst of being a Communist is that the parties you may go to are—well—awfully funny and touching but not very gay,” she tells her sister.)

So it was that the Woolfs chose an area pretty, solid, clearly respectable but with an edge of bohemianism. Londoners to the bone, the