Writer’s sheds

It’s amazing how many writers have found the shed to be essential to their productive output. I have a friend who writes in her shed, but she’s not the only one.

Way back in 1906, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw built a hut on a rotating platform that he could move to follow the sun's path across the sky. Bernard Shaw was fairly eccentric in a lot of ways: he used his plays and fiction, as well as newspaper articles to argue in favour of socialism and women's rights, he was a vegetarian and teetotaller, and a committed enemy of formal education. His death was rather eccentric too – he died in 1950 at the age of 94 as the result of injuries incurred by falling from a ladder while he was attempting to prune a tree!

When Mark Twain moved to Elmira in New York State, in 1874, his sister-in-law built an octagonal one-room studio (American for shed!). Twain loved it, ‘It is a cozy nest, with just room in it for a sofa and a table and three or four chairs.... And when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes above the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it!

Virginia Woolf's writing shed at Monk's House, East Sussex was situated on the edge of a churchyard – it provided an escape from the world, for a writer whose main focus in creation was to have her own space as described in the famous series of lectures she gave, later turned into an essay called ‘A Room of One’s Own’ . It also overlooked the River Ouse, where she was eventually to commit suicide by loading her pockets with stones and walking into the water. Inside the weatherboard building, known as The Lodge, Virginia's diaries and photographs are now on display, along with her desk, and the lamp that she used to write by.

Writer’s shed photograph by sa_ku_ra, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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