India, June 13 -- In 2019, Fay Bound Alberti, a professor of modern history at King's College London, posted the question on X: "What does loneliness sound like?" The answers were evocative.

"The wind whistling in my chimney."

"Laughter. in other places."

"A clicking radiator as it goes on and off."

It is "a sense of lack [that] can make the belly feel so empty", as she puts it in her book, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (2019).

In the book, Alberti, 53, dissects this "emotion cluster" to reveal its component parts: anger, resentment, sorrow, jealousy, self-pity, shame.

Weaving together fragments of popular culture (Wuthering Heights, Twilight, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the writings of Virginia Woolf) and exp...