Lisa Owens

In the mid-2000s, the Guardian weekend magazine ran a regular feature called “Writers’ Rooms.” As a secretly aspiring writer (is there any other kind?) I couldn’t get enough, poring over the photographs of book-lined studies furnished with beautiful antique desks. These images seemed both to represent literary success, and contain the key to it.

‘There’s no place like home,” Dorothy declares at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she departs the dazzling Emerald City for Aunt Em’s Kansas farmhouse. It’s a powerful metaphor for the way the domestic sphere is often portrayed in art: action, adventure and drama happen “out there” in glorious Technicolor, with the home rendered by contrast in sober sepia tones. Home may be the place we ultimately yearn for, but only once we have left it behind.