Bricked in, locked up, or sealed behind their own front gates.

Issued one pencil a week, he spent thirty-five years balancing the ledgers of a universe he'd crowned himself emperor of.

A bishop sealed her inside a stone room, and she stayed for forty years — then T.S. Eliot quoted her during the Blitz.

She sent fourteen unsolicited watercolors to a stranger in rural Japan. That stranger was Georgia O'Keeffe, and she wrote back.

He built the largest ballroom in England and used it to roller-skate alone.

Nellie Bly spent one night practicing insanity in a mirror, then fooled every doctor who examined her.