The rooms of certain writers are mythologised almost as much as the works themselves: the Brontës’ study in the parsonage; Virginia Woolf’s garden room; 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.
And yet writers, old and new, have worked in all kinds of places: in bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries, in bathrooms and while on the move. From Emily Dickinson’s hidden writing pocket to Lauren Elkin typing on her phone on the bus, Maya Angelou in hotel rooms and Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafés to the founders of Women of Color Press around their kitchen tables, Katie da Cunha Lewin dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer’s room and opens it up.