Where would any writer be without a room of their own?

If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana, that there’s a pen on the desk, mid-novel, and it feels as though he’s about to return from a day’s fishing. You might encounter, as Hermione Lee did visiting the novelist Elizabeth Bowen’s beloved ancestral home in Ireland, only a pile of grass and stones, because the building has been razed to the ground. Or you might discover, as Kate Kennedy did seeking out the Gloucester mental asylum where the poet and composer Ivor Gurney was incarcerated, that it has been turned to a new use. The chapel of Barnwood House Hospital is now a makeshift gym, and Kennedy watched as men sweated and grunted beneath the wooden hymn board, still listing the hymns for the final service.

Writers’ homes are, as Lee says in the introduction to this thoughtful, meticulously edited collection of essays, a crucial part of their life:

How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people, whether it’s the choice of wallpaper, the mess in the kitchen, the silence or shouting over meals, doors left open or closed, a fire burning in the hearth.

All biographers must explore their subjects’ home, or lack of home, and this collection will be an invaluable resource for those thinking through these questions in future.

It also allows readers to enter the houses of writers they love alongside a group of particularly eloquent and reflective guides. There are 23 pieces here, many of them reflections by biographers on their research, with a few poems, investigative essays and memoir pieces thrown in.