Modernist literature, too, has long provided Barker with inspiration for her spindly spatial constructions: both the metaphorical and actual space of Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – the unfolding of a novel is, too, a kind of space-making – might provide discreet associations with her work. Yet Barker’s works refuse to cooperate with conventional categorization: these are the spaces between, like the gaps that separate words in a sentence. Their power lies in what they don’t quite say.