The shelf · Loneliness and solitude
Does A Biography of Loneliness hold up?
A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion, by Fay Bound Alberti (2019)
A historian traces loneliness as a modern emotion tied to individualism and industrialisation.
The short answer
Its history of the emotion is supported, but the word itself is older than the claim says.
The claims, checked
The word 'loneliness' did not exist in English before about 1800.
Does not hold The word appears in Thomas Blount's dictionary in 1656, meaning the physical state of being alone. The separate claim, that loneliness as an emotion became common around 1800, is supported by historians of emotion.
Evidence: Queen Mary University of London, History of Emotions