“Judging by her publicity photos, the natural assumption would be that American novelist Edith Wharton wrote in a traditional manner, at the gold-tooled leather-topped desk in her extremely well-stocked library.”

But this was “in fact a deliberate illusion.” She wrote in bed. Why? Johnson suspects that it had something to do with the desire to delay getting dressed, which for women in the 1800s, meant getting tied into a corset. And there’s more: Proust lined the walls and ceiling of his room with cork to muffle the sounds made by the dentist who worked above him. George Bernard Shaw wrote in a shed that was on casters so that it could be rotated to face the sun. Who can resist this sort of trivia about the working habits of writers?

Johnson, Alex. Rooms of Their Own: Where Great Writers Write. Frances Lincoln, 2022, p. 169.