Singing by Herself: Lonely Poets in the Long Eighteenth Century. By AmeliaWorsley. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2024. 258 p. $46.95 (hb). ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐7627‐4.

The notion that mid-eighteenth-century writers were lonely — a pervasive cultural condition John Sitter called ‘literary loneliness’ — remains among the most influential interpretations of the period. Retreat constituted a common method for dealing with, or avoiding, the problem of history, and the female-gendered figures invoked by apostrophe provided a substitute society compensating for a world with no place for the poet. Singing by Herself revises Sitter's concept of ‘literary loneliness’ to reveal that consolation and comfort are far from the only attributes communicated by the feminized muses of eighteenth-century poetry, nor are they limited to mid-century. Worsley's revisionist account encompasses John Milton, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Charlotte Smith, extending the lineage of literary loneliness. More significantly, she examines the extraordinary range of uses to which poets put the rhetoric of solitude — including that of ‘female complaint’.