Psychology Today | 22.04.2026 22:59
Virginia Woolf, the 20th century novelist, famously wrote that women need a room of their own, a place where they could write without interruption or distraction. A private space isn’t important only to writers. “I want to be alone,” a line in the movie Grand Hotel delivered by Greta Garbo, was associated with her the rest of her life. So much did she seek being left alone that, retired from Hollywood at age 36, after an enormously successful career as one of the highest paid and awarded actors of her time, she lived the rest of her life in solitude, a near recluse.
