The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love

Description

Why does a remote cabin, ramshackle shed or library garret, strewn with papers and piled with books, so capture our imagination?

The rooms of certain writers are mythologised almost as much as the works themselves: the Brontë’s study in the parsonage; Virginia Woolf’s garden room at Monks House; Sigmund Freud’s study, with its famous couch. They are preserved in writers’ houses or recreated in museums, pictured and described in newspaper columns and on Instagram, seemingly standing in for the labour of writing itself.

And yet writers, old and new, have worked in all kinds of places: in hotels, bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries, in bathrooms and while on the move. From Emily Dickinson’s hidden writing pocket to Lauren Elkin writing on her phone on the bus, from Maya Angelou in hotel rooms and Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafés to the founders of Women of Color Press around their kitchen tables, writer and academic Katie da Cunha Lewin dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer’s room and opens it up.

Blending cultural critique with the personal and historical, The Writer’s Room takes us on a fascinating journey through the hidden worlds that shape the books we love.