A Room of Her Own: Robyn Lea's newest photography book reveals the layers and wealth of creative female minds

By Kate Mazade

The thing about homes is that they are wholly personal.

Often in life we are expected to be only part of ourselves—a caring sister, a reserved professional, a witty friend, a patient partner, a daring creator—and we are each of those things. But we are all of them at the same time, even if we only show individual sides in different situations.

Home is the only place where we can be all of ourselves—and Robyn Lea captured that.

Published in 2021 by Thames & Hudson, Robyn Lea's A Room of Her Own: Inside the Homes and Lives of Creative Women profiles twenty female makers through intimately condensed biographies and expansively revealing photographs. An Australian photographer, author, and director, Lea has published numerous books, including bestseller Dinner with Jackson Pollock. Her dynamic photographs and writing has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue USA, Architectural Digest, and Elle Décor, as well as in ten solo exhibitions.

Inside a blushing pink cover with bold LaDoubleJ patterned endpapers, Lea managed not only to photograph women's homes but to capture the emotional range and overlapping characters of creative women. With a informal and chatty tone, Lea gets to know the artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs, outlining their personal lives and spaces. She invites the readers into the conversation as if we were all sitting on a stylish love seat blowing on our too-hot tea and laughing at how much we love grandmama's needlepoint bird chair even though it goes with absolutely nothing we own.

Each chapter beings with a half spread portrait of the subject—even if her body is missing from the image, her presence lingers in the space. Opposite, a graphic collage reflects the subject's name, art, and unique style pulled from both her home and her work. Designed by Ashlea O'Neill of Salt Camp Studio, the chapters contain full-bleed, high-contrast photographs and a 2-page narrative. The profiles are complete with a multi-photo collage spread detailing the intimate moments and caveats that compose their lives. Mostly interior roomscapes and detail shots, the photographs show how women are multi-layered. How no one can fully understand her by looking at her façade.

From Gothic Austrian castles to chic Milanese flats to sprawling Sicilian villas, each home is a dream inside a fairytale, complete with Prince Charming and floral wallpaper. Lea also tells each subject's love story, maintaining that creative minds cannot be detached from passionate hearts.

However, it isn't always rainbows and butterflies and happy homes. Some of the women profiled have created beautiful, comfortable spaces out of necessity—to find stability and safe haven in their lives. Whether it is a home in a new country or a new stage of life, each of the spaces is a sanctuary to she who dwells in it.

Even with the joyful colors and vibrant prints, many creative works and spaces hold a sense of loss—and from sorrow there is beauty. In each profile, women leave their childhood homes and go out to seek the world, wandering and traveling and searching and loving until they find respite in their new space. The over-filled images betray a collective loneliness that each of us has experienced and instill the sense that we don't create our own spaces as much as they find us.

Of the twenty women and homes profiled, there is a richness seemingly unattainable. There is very little thread of the "starving artist" archetype, as which many more of us identify. Yes, these homes a beautiful, and yes, these women have earned their success and fortune. But where is the profile of the artistic girl trying and struggling to "make it"? Where are the photographs of the hand-me-down armchairs and fiberboard dressers? The in-progress painting slid under the sofa because the desk is also the dining table?

Upon first reading, I was frustrated, but with more research into the book's namesake, I settled into temporary dejection. Originally a lecture given to female collegians at Oxford, Virginia Woolf's extended essay "A Room of One's Own" was published in 1929. Passionate and practical, Woolf stated that to be creative, women need their own space to think—and money in order to have time to create.

“Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself, still you may say that the mind should rise above such things; and that great poets have often been poor men,” Woolf writes. “It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth.”

She specified £500 per year, which today rounds to about $45,600 (USD) annually. This is three times the national minimum wage and right at the average salary for full-time working women. Not including any sort of savings, income growth, or luxury budget for gilded picture frames or sculptural tile, this is just the amount of money—already at one's disposal, not currently being earned—necessary to have the time needed to craft something.

After nearly 100 years, the requirement is the same. The price, for women's freedom to create, is A Room of Her Own and money.

But then I thought, "why criticize these women for their fortune? Am I blaming them for reaping the benefits of their hard work and therefore holding women to a patriarchal system in which men should be rich and women should struggle?"

So I went back again, pouring over the photographs, searching for something with which to identify, something that showed the traces of the starving artist and her path to prosperity.

A tangle of pink rickrack, a cheap pen on a half-used legal pad, the blue painters tape holding the box together, a dog-eared paperback on the nightstand, the wadded rag stained with a rainbow of paint drips until it's more gray than color, the handcrafted antique tambourine hung on a plastic command strip.

And I began to see. I began to see that she is still there. That all of us carry within ourselves a memory of the girl we used to be and a hope for the woman we wish to become. That we are more than the stained rag and painter’s tape—more than mural walls and antique lamps. That we can, and should, be all of ourselves, especially in our own spaces. We can be the witty friend and the patient partner, the starving artist and the girl boss.

Because that's the thing about homes, they are wholly personal.

A Room of Her Own is available through the publisher's website and through multiple online sellers.