A Biography of Loneliness The History of an Emotion

Despite 21st-century fears of an 'epidemic' of loneliness, its history has been sorely neglected. A Biography of Loneliness offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist. And where loneliness is identified, it is not always bad, but a complex emotional state that differs according to class, gender, ethnicity and experience.

Looking at informative case studies such as Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf, A Biography of Loneliness charts the emergence of loneliness as a modern and embodied emotional state.

Fay Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History at the University of York.

Dr Fay Bound Alberti is a writer and cultural historian. She co-founded the Centre for the History of Emotion at Queen Mary University of London, where she was Honorary Senior Research Fellow in History. Fay has taught at various UK universities, including Manchester, Lancaster, and York, with a focus on the histories of gender, emotion, health, and medicine, and has written extensively in the fields of history, medical history, and women's history. Her books include Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (OUP 2010), and This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (OUP 2016). She also provides consultancy services in funding and research, based on her senior management roles for the Arcadia Fund and the Wellcome Trust.

Acknowledgements
Preface: No (Wo)man is an island
Introduction: Loneliness as a 'modern epidemic'
1. When 'oneliness' became loneliness: the birth of a modern emotion
2. A 'disease of the blood'? The chronic loneliness of Sylvia Plath
3. Loneliness and lack: romantic love, from Wuthering Heights to Twilight
4. Widowhood and loss: from Thomas Turner to the Widow of Windsor
5. Instaglum? Social media and the making of online community
6. A 'ticking timebomb'? Rethinking loneliness in old age
7. Roofless and rootless: no place to call 'home'
8. Feeding the hunger. Materiality and the neglected lonely body
9. Lonely clouds and empty vessels. When loneliness is a gift
Conclusion: reframing loneliness in a neoliberal age
Further reading
Appendix