Will a spell in prison free Chris Huhne's inner novelist?

During the weekend, the recently convicted high flyer Chris Huhne, immured in Wanno, as its inmates call HMP Wandsworth, was reported to be "reading a lot, mainly novels".

Who has not, at some time or other, entertained the fantasy of all the reading they might do during a sustained spell of leisure? This might not have involved enforced leisure in prison, but let's say it applies. My wish list of cellblock reading includes Richardson's Clarissa, the complete Jane Austen, Byron's Letters and possibly the King James Bible (why not?). When PG Wodehouse was interned by the Nazis at the beginning of the second world war, he took just one book: the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Presumably, in Wanno, things are a bit different with an e-reader.

Prison – variously rendered as the nick, the slammer, coop, clink, cooler, glasshouse – has always had a literary dimension. Writers in prison, novels about prison. As an existential experience, the deprivation of liberty has been known to inspire a creative response. In simple plot terms, it's a winner. Turn the key on the cell door and you pose the question: how and when will the captive escape? It's a potent variation on the oldest question in the book: what happened next?

In the literary psychodrama of prison, the imposition of "durance vile" (a long prison sentence) was often mixed up with religious persecution and state repression. John Bunyan conceived The Pilgrim's Progress in Bedford County Jail. Walter Raleigh wrote the first volume of his History of the World in the Tower of London. Subsequently, the threat of prison became another kind of literary criticism. Daniel Defoe, a great survivor, was put in the stocks for his published opinions, and lived to tell the tale (many didn't).

In the heyday of Grub Street, books and penury went hand in hand. Many writers and journalists worked in the shadow of the debtor's prison. John Dickens, the father of the novelist, was thrown into the Marshalsea for debt, an experience young Charles never forgot – and used to brilliant effect in Little Dorrit.

But there's a danger in letting fiction romanticise prison. Victorian jails could be fatal destinations. Oscar Wilde's life was effectively cut short by his two years of hard labour in the 1890s. His experience yields perhaps two of the greatest literary responses to prison, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and his neglected masterpiece, De Profundis.

After Wilde, a short list of writers in prison includes Jean Genet, Arthur Koestler and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the public response becomes steadily ironised. The story is told of Picasso, who was invited to contribute to a fund to help Russian writers out of the gulag: he refused. They write better in prison, he said.

And it can be true. Jeffrey Archer has never won any prizes for his prose – he probably wouldn't want to – but his three prison diaries have an honesty and directness, mixed with quality reportage, that put them into a different league from his fiction.

Will Chris Huhne use his enforced leisure to write? As the old saying goes: keep a journal, and it will keep you. Huhne might be short of money, and his prison story will have a market, so he may well write something. With a bit of luck those novels he's reading now will give him a boost.