Description
Singing by Herself reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms lonely and loneliness in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint.
Amelia Worsley shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclosure, this study of eighteenth-century poetry disrupts the presumed association between isolation, singular speech, and bounded models of poetic subjectivity.
In five chapters focused on lonely poet figures in the works of John Milton, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Th
