Readers of my fiction will know that I paint settings vividly. A strong sense of place brings colour and context and atmosphere to the story. But setting is not only important on the page; setting matters a great deal to the writer striving to put words on paper.

I write in my homes in Ireland, Kent and France – usually inside, at a big antique desk in a room lined with bookshelves, though in fine weather I find a shady spot in the garden with a view and the scent of flowers. My writing spaces are sanctuaries for me. They are quite private spaces, where I can immerse myself in my writing; where I may struggle or soar on wings – silently; where, when the muse is present, a certain magic fills the air.

Ever since, years ago, I set up my first writing room, I have been fascinated by writers’ spaces. On my shelf are these books:

I have decided to explore, in a series of articles,  some of the spaces – the rooms, the corners, the nooks – of famous writers through history, in search of an understanding of where writers need to be physically in order to feel able to write. Do we, in fact, need ‘a room of one’s own’, as Virginia Woolf wrote, or does the outlook count more, or the light, or the quiet?

Where better location to start my series than near my home in Kent, at Sissinghurst Castle.

The estate, whose original house dates back to the 1550s, had fallen into disrepair when it was purchased by Vita Sackville-West in 1930.

Portrait by William Strang, 1918

Vita was the daughter of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville, and her ancestral home was Knole, one of England’s largest houses, set in a sprawling 1,000-acre park in Kent. Vita loved Knole, but when her father died Knole passed to the next closest male relative in the family, much to Vita’s distress.

Sissinghurst was Vita’s chance to create a new place that would feel like home in her heart, and that is exactly what she did, renovating the Grade I listed castle and its surrounding grounds with her husband, author and diplomat Harold Nicholson, over many years. The estate is famous to this day for the extensive gardens the couple created.

Credit: Oast House Archive / Formal Gardens at Sissinghurst Castle / CC BY-SA 2.0

Vita wrote a column on her gardening for the Observer newspaper from 1946 until the year before her death, 1961. But while she was passionate about her garden, she did not want to be remembered as a gardening correspondent; she wanted to go down in history as a poet and a writer. She took her writing craft seriously, and claimed for herself a place on the estate that was hers and hers alone, for her writing.

This is the tower gatehouse where Vita wrote the novels and poetry that would earn her a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and an Order of the Companions of Honour.

The tower was Vita’s private space, off limits to all except a very few guests by invitation. Even her children were not allowed up the stairs to the first-floor writing room.

After Vita’s death, Sissinghurst became a National Trust property, and today visitors can climb the spiral staircase in the tower and peek over threshold (held back by a barrier) into Vita’s room, which has been kept intact, as she left it. When I visited, I was struck by how many books she kept near at hand – 2,700, according to the National Trust – and how homely she had made the space, with a beautiful wall tapestry and rugs and a couch. Her desk faces a wall, so the view here was not what mattered to Vita; she needed the solitude – the room of one’s own, with a lock and key, as her friend and lover Virginia Woolf advocated.

The Telegraph newspaper depicts Vita’s tower writing space as ‘The beautiful room every writer wants to own’. I would love to write there. Would you love to have such a sanctuary too?