This week Bernadine Evaristo announced that she would be lending out her cottage in Kent to fellow writers. Evaristo herself is now a respected and successful literary figure, her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly winning the Booker prize jointly with Margaret Atwood in 2019. She is now President of the Royal Society of Literature. But coming herself from a family of eight children, she knows from experience that space for your self and your own work can sometimes be difficult to find.
Her hope is to help other writers who might make the most of a rare opportunity to have a focused space and time to write. Although aspiring tenants will need to be professionally active writers already, many writers struggle financially and cannot live on their writing earnings alone. Research by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society in 2022 found that writers’ median earnings were only £7000 per year in the UK. In 2006 the figure had been £12,330. The median salary in the UK in 2022 was £27,756 which clearly demonstrates the difficulties faced by most writers.
Woolf’s Room
Virginia Woolf (left) famously argued that ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ in her extended essay A Room of One’s Own. While the essay is primarily about acknowledging the undervaluing of women’s role in society, she acknowledges that necessity for space and finances that Evaristo’s offer recognises.
Sheds and Other Secluded Places
Both Roald Dahl and George Bernard Shaw famously wrote in their garden sheds, offering them a place of seclusion but not too far from home comforts. Shaw extended his privacy, being rather anti-social. ‘People bother me,’ he admitted. He went to his shed ‘to hide from them.’ He took this further, by naming his shed ‘London’. When people called, his housekeeper could say ‘I’m terribly sorry, but Mr Shaw is in London’, sending them away without any falsehood.
Both Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy had favourite desks and chairs – Hardy’s study is pictured left. Dickens was more obsessive than Hardy, though. He often had his desk shipped to wherever he was when he was compelled to spend time away from home.
JK Rowling famously wrote the first Harry Potter novel in a café in Edinburgh, while Maya Angelou used to rent a room on a local hotel in order to write. There she had all she wanted:
I have a bedroom, with a bed, a table, and a bath. I have Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, and the Bible. Usually a deck of cards and some crossword puzzles.
The hotel staff, though, were not allowed to enter, and she had all distracting decoration removed.
Vladimir Nabokov apparently used to like reading and writing in the privacy of a parked car, however cramped that may have been – but what about Agatha Christie, who used to dream up her detective novels while lounging in a large bath with a wide edge where she could leave her apple cores?