A room of one’s own” is what Virginia Woolf claimed writers needed to thrive. Hers – in the physical world at least – was a shed on the edge of a graveyard in Sussex, south-east England. Roald Dahl meanwhile fabulated his mean and magical tales in a little white cottage in the grounds of his Gypsy House; Philip Pullman famously brewed His Dark Materials in a shack at the bottom of his Oxford garden (although a surfeit of books has now forced him out); and, according to a recent book by Adam Sharr, the very essence of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy might be extrapolated from the Black Forest hut in which he noted it down.
Apparently writers not only want rooms of their own; they want them outside the house, in more natural surroundings.
