A Biography of Loneliness

The History of an Emotion

By: Fay Bound Alberti

Narrated by: Henrietta Meire

Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's Summary

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 18th century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not a historical, 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.

©2019 Fay Bound Alberti (P)2020 Tantor

Not as interesting as it might seem

The description says loudly that "A Biography of Loneliness offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. " No new radical interpretation is actually given. The whole book is just about reading the definitions of "loneliness" and its family words (solitude, isolation and others) from Cambridge Dictionary and the statistics of loneliness depending on age, social status, social networks and so on (mostly from UK).

I was hoping to have a large philosophical view on the state of being alone in this book but it seems that philosophy is dead in our century. Better take Stoics, Nietzsche and the classics if you want to understand yourself and your loneliness.