A Biography of Loneliness: Read an excerpt from the book by Fay Bound Alberti

Hindustan Times

13-06-2025

In the critically acclaimed The Lonely City (2017), the writer Olivia Laing extolled the pleasures as well as the pains of loneliness, identifying loneliness as a creative enterprise as well as a manifestation of a particular urban identity. Laing illustrates beautifully the paradoxical situation of loneliness in the modern urban landscape, where one is theoretically closer to others, yet also anonymized and placeless. She links her personal story of loneliness in a vast city to works of modern art, including the anonymity of the self in the work of the American realist painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882–1967). Hopper's representations of modern American life, of solitary figures in a hotel lobby or a diner, for instance, surrounded by the possibility of companionship yet somehow removed from others, have become synonymous with the alienation of the urban environment.
For the Romantic poets, loneliness intersected with the creation of a particular kind of secular, creative identity—one which was gendered and combined ideas about civilization versus nature with the pursuit of beauty, love, and the soul. The vision of loneliness as a Romantic ideal in the broadest sense, linked to the poetry and writings of the Romantic poets in late eighteenth -and nineteenth- century Britain, drew together earlier ideas about the divine and the spiritual, and reworked these for a humanistic and sometimes deistic mood.
The American literary critic and essayist William Deresiewicz has summarized the emergence of Romantic ideals about solitude in ways that acknowledge their eighteenth-century origins and religious roots:
The self was now encountered not in God but in Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: The poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability.
The Romantics were not inherently antisocial or in constant need of solitude, then, though that was once a widely held belief. They took moments of solitude, as Wordsworth had, in order to commune with nature, and valued time to reflect on what they had seen, but they were also intensely social when it came to spending time with other poets and writers, to enjoying the conviviality of urbane society. Indeed, the point of writing for the Romantics was to perform a social service as well as a personal and spiritual good; it was searching for answers that might help the individual to negotiate his or her way through an increasingly mechanized, urbanized, and (for some) brutish environment of the Industrial Revolution, and the 'dark, satanic mills' of William Blake.
Like Blake, Wordsworth (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who jointly published Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth in 1798, though the second edition of 1800 had only the latter as the author) was part of the first generation of British Romantics. In the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set out the elements for a new type of poetic verse that moved away from the rigid diction of eighteenth-century poetry towards a spontaneous writing style said to be earned through tranquillity in nature and proximity to the soil. The construction of a particular middle-class Romantic sentiment marked by excessive emotionalism and sensitivity to the natural world allowed the self-reflection and introspection needed to commune with God in nature.
Wordsworth remained religious throughout his life, though the same was not true of all Romantic poets. And his 'Daffodils' emphasizes the significance of solitude and quiet reflection for this creative process which paralleled the imagination (the inward eye) and the existence of the divine: 'for oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude'. There are no negative associations here attached to the state of being alone. Loneliness is less apparent in Wordsworth's writings than solitude, which reflects the eighteenth-century absence of loneliness as a pathologized emotional state.
As an aside on the centrality of the natural world to the early Romantics, particular forms of environment are known to mediate and promote a sense of loneliness. Geographers, particularly cultural geographers, are sophisticated in narrating the emotional impact of the physical world. One of the striking aspects of twenty-first-century loneliness, especially in urban, impoverished settings, is the lack of 'nature' of any kind; people who do not see greenery from one day to the next are prone, in some studies, to mental health problems, including loneliness, and there is increasing evidence of the restorative function of green spaces. The medicalization of the environment as a source of wellbeing is reminiscent of eighteenth-century discussions of climate and 'taking the air' by engaging with nature in relation to health, as well as the concept of holistic health and the habits of the body. It is important to note both the links between urban impoverishment and a lack of green spaces in twenty-first-century life, and the class-based interpretation of nature as a source of solace during the Romantic era. For Wordsworth's 'peasants', the natural world was much in evidence in the pre-industrial landscape, but it was overwhelmingly the context of hard, manual labour rather than quiet contemplation.
In Shelley's Frankenstein, the eponymous doctor seeks solitude as a respite from guilt and regret: 'I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, death-like solitude'. There is a hint here of the modern alienation that would become so central to the writers of the early twentieth century, in which solitude was equally respite and torment. Importantly, there is not a single reference to 'loneliness' in Frankenstein, and only one reference to 'lonely', which meant little more than the state of being alone. The desolation of solitude could be associated with the abandonment by the creator; this seems compatible with my suggestion that the increasing secularization of society in outward forms from the late eighteenth century contributed to the creation of loneliness as an emotional state: loneliness as related not only to the state of being alone, but to a related sense of abandonment. At the time Mary Shelley was writing, and despite the political and social radicalism of many of the Romantic poets, women's creativity was still marginalized; some recent scholars have argued that women within the Romantic circle nevertheless experienced distinct forms of alienation and loneliness as artists. Certainly, they might not have wandered as freely in search of daffodils as their male counterparts. And women's writing in the Romantic period continues to be downplayed in favour of their male counterparts.
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From 1905, a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals had begun meeting at the home of Virginia Woolf, and her sister, artist Vanessa Bell: 46 Gordon Square, London. These members of the self-constructed 'Bloomsbury Group' were liberal, from wealthy, white backgrounds, and their bohemian rejection of conventional attitudes to sex, morality, and marriage was part of their self-definition. Woolf, however, suffered from mental illness all her life, probably exacerbated by the sexual abuse she had experienced as a child. Woolf also recognized that periods of loneliness were central to her ability to write, to imagine, to create new worlds that were removed from the daily routines of everyday life: 'It is going to be a time of adventure and attack', Woolf wrote in her journal on 28 May 1929—'rather lonely and painful I think. But solitude will be good for a new book. Of course, I shall make friends. I shall be external outwardly. I shall buy some good clothes and go out into new houses. All the time I shall attack this angular shape in my mind'.
(Excerpted with permission from A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion by Fay Bound Alberti, published by Oxford University Press; 2019)