The introduction to this volume advances its collective research agenda of renewing and advancing critical approaches to friendship and modern personal life. It outlines what a critical approach to friendship entails and delineates three central themes underlying debates in the social science literature on friendship: ideals, choice, and contexts. It both consolidates these debates and offers new directions for advancing them through a series of key interventions in critical approaches to friendship. These interventions are divided into the core thematic sections of the book: (1) critical intimacies, differences, and ruptures; (2) critical sociabilities beyond the private; and (3) critical relational junctures. The introduction also elucidates the thematic cohesion of the volume, emphasizing how the chapters are united by a commitment to ethnographic methods, interpretive theoretical approaches, and critical theory.

In most of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, short stories, and essays published between 1929 and 1949, London never quite registers as the same city from one work to the next. Bowen’s representations of London across her oeuvre are best characterised by their unceasing transformations, ever-morphing geographies, atmospheric shifts, and cosmopolitan bearings. Before she moved to a terrace house on Regent’s Park in 1935 with her husband Alan Cameron, her fiction, like Bowen herself, was London-adjacent. It registers in some of her early work as a city that broadcasts the dull enticements of ancestral obligation. Ingénues in these novels adapt this habit; they gaze at London from afar through the combined lenses of a vivid, though vague, literary imagination and a sluggish cultural legacy, or they conceive of it as a launchpad for a career as an artist. After 1935, and especially after her experiences of London during the blitz, Bowen’s perceptions of the city transform from immobile scenes of social paralysis towards the blistering desire for new, enthralling, and sometimes strange associations.

Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels display her lifelong preoccupation with disappointment, discord, and desire between mismatched lovers. Like their author, these characters seek genuine connection to remedy abandonment by beloved figures. This chapter uses ‘love’ in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing infatuation, sexual attraction, and unconsummated desire, as well as romantic and sexual attachment. Bowen’s keen awareness of social norms and customs shapes her plotting and foregrounds the complex interplay of private desires and public expectations. Three thematic strands dominate her portrayal of lovers: unrequited love, typically involving younger female protagonists and older, more experienced partners; transgressive love, for entanglements featuring characters who break taboos through their relationships; and illicit love, featuring secretive protagonists fearing exposure to public judgement. Across Bowen’s oeuvre, past lovers or previous relationships haunt the narrative present. Unrequited, transgressive, or illicit love might be buried or repressed, but ultimately it causes emotional disturbances for lovers in the present.

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

William James’s exquisite attention to thinking begins, by his own account, in what he learned from “the divine Emerson” about how cultivating the practice of carefully tailoring a habit of words to clothe a perception becomes itself a habit of mind. This habit of mind was trained for James, on “forg[ing] every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts” about being human in “the vast driftings of the cosmic weather.” What Emerson uncovered and James went on to investigate and assemble into his “mosaic philosophy” through his comprehensive study of physiology, neurology, wave theory, experimental psychology, and their related fields, is that in thinking, reading, imagining, and writing we are, in fact, experiencing quantum reality, as both Niels Bohr and Alfred North Whitehead recognized in the contribution of “that adorable genius.”

Coalescing developments in brain, mind, and body bring about qualitative changes in all aspects of the teenager’s life, with both great advantages and challenges. Being able to imagine how things could be, and seeing multiple possibilities, can lead to idealism or cynicism. Teens are aware of the complexity of thought and feeling and know that neither they nor others are always aware of motives. Along with a profound sense of uniqueness, they have the capacity to connect with others in a deeper, more intimate way and to be involved in a complex network of relationships. At the same time, they can feel alone in dealing with emotions at a new level of complexity. To thrive during this period they must be able to tolerate a level of vulnerability never before experienced, because they know others may be thinking about them and seeing beneath the surface of their behavior, just as they can.

This chapter foregrounds the silencing of the experiences of homosexuals under Nazi rule. It discusses the implications of Paragraph 175 of the criminal code and the legal definition of homosexual acts. It examines the way in which fear of persecution and police interrogations shaped the behavior of gay men, while some men maintained a gay lifestyle of sorts. Lesbians remained outside the formal scope of Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which covered only males.

The term lyric conjures many different things: musical language, emotional intensity, the qualities of ritual or prayer, introspection, and interiority. It has also come to designate a wide variety of spoken, sung, and printed poetic forms. This chapter explores Shelley’s relations to these ideas and forms through his reading and his writing. It also places Shelley’s writing in the context of modern and contemporary lyric theory, which investigates and expands the meaning of the term lyric and puts useful pressure on assumptions we might have about poetic voice, subjects, or speakers. In bringing these various contexts together, I suggest that none of them can wholly determine Shelleyan lyric, which is by turns formally constrained and politically engaged, intimate and impersonal.

This ethnography explores violence in relationships in Sierra Leone, using the ‘teeth and tongue’ metaphor to reveal the complex interplay between love and violence, particularly in gender dynamics. It examines how global agendas lead some states to extend regulatory control into intimacy, often perpetuating neo-colonial mechanisms. The study probes the clash between rigid state laws and the nuanced intricacies of lived experiences, analysing the impact of ostensibly impartial rights discourses. The book analyses the effects of external violence on relationships (Chapter 2), contemporary relationship dynamics in Freetown (Chapter 3), and critiques prevalent conceptualisations of love and violence phenomenologically (Chapters 4 and 5). It then examines the mediation and regulation of violence by households and communities (Chapter 6), state courts for adults (Chapter 7), and the legal treatment of minors (Chapter 8). The book traces the impact of new legislation on young men who were imprisoned and their partners (Chapter 9).

This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.

The word ‘Klavier’ occurs only twice in the texts of Schubert’s lieder, but both times in a prominent position – namely, in the titles of Christian Daniel Friedrich Schubart’s ‘An mein Klavier’ and Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Laura am Klavier’, both set to music in 1816 (respectively D342 and D388). The first poem deals with two figures – the narrative persona and his piano; the second with three – Laura, the piano and the narrative persona. In Schubart, the emphasis falls on the piano’s expressive potential; in Schiller, mainly on the impression it imparts. The two poems thus present the instrument in quite different, even antithetical, guises: introverted versus extroverted. Although Schubert turned to poems that were already a generation old (they were first published in 1785 and 1782, respectively) and had a different sound in mind compared to the two poets (this was an age of rapid evolution in keyboard instrument construction), the instrumental aesthetic displayed in Schubart’s and Schiller’s poems still applied with undiminished force in 1816. The antitheses marked by the poems Schubert chose with respect to the Klavier reveal the breadth of notions associated with the instruments that went by that name around 1800.