The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them

The Sense of an Interioris a fascinating exploration of domestic space and of the ways it determines how writers work. In four beautiful essay-chapters Diana Fuss examines four exemplary figures - Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust. Women and men, gay and straight, European and American, bound together by their gifts as writers, by the special bond between each of them and the space within which they wrote. But in Diana Fuss's hands we discover something more: while Helen Keller is certainly the most remarkable in her triumph over profound disabilities, each of the other three sustained a disability of their own. Dickinson, who confined herself to the house in Amherst, suffered from periodic bouts of blindness. Freud's famous examining room in Vienna was arranged to compensate for his deafness in one ear. Helen Keller's home in Easton, Connecticut was a world she could master until, with age, even her sense of touch finally failed her. Neurotic Proust, obsessed withsmell, hated the odor of cooking and arranged his apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann to keep him as far as possible from the kitchen. Illustrated with almost sixty images, many rare, and some never before published, this richly observed book weaves together new understandings of domestic space, creativity, and disability.

Diana Fuss is Professor of English at Princeton University.