"In four chapters, Diana Fuss examines the private living and writing spaces of Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust. Male and female, European and American, Victorian and Modern, these monumental figures of intellectual history are bound together by their gifts as writers, and by their fascination with all things interior." "Fuss brings us across the writer's threshold, opening a door onto the hidden world where literature is produced. These private home theaters for the rehearsal of language are each organized around a particular sensory challenge. Dickinson, who confined herself to the family homestead in Amherst, suffered from periodic bouts of blindness. Freud's famous consulting room in Vienna was arranged to compensate for his deafness in one ear. Keller's home in Easton, Connecticut became a place of danger and injury as old age and eczema gradually dulled her sensitivity to touch. And Proust, literary history's most acclaimed asthmatic, distanced the bedroom of his Paris apartment from the odors of kitchen and courtyard to protect his delicate sense of smell."--BOOK JACKET.