It is typical of Hardy that he should move from such parlor drama to the vast and exhausted quiet that followed the Armistice, at the end of the First World War. In a poem titled “And There Was a Great Calm,” from 1920, he writes of bewildered soldiers murmuring, “Strange, this! How? All firing stopped.” McLoughlin quotes those words and backs them up by reproducing a graphic of an audio recording made by the U.S. Army Signal Corps at that exact time, in 1918. Stuttering lines, on the left, jerking up and down, denote the rattle of guns; on the right, the lines are all but flat, as silence descends. (Can an official document become a work of art, by dint of what it gravely represents?) In memory of that hour and in honor of the dead, a two-minute silence is still observed across the United Kingdom at 11 A.M., on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, every year.

As customs go, a nationwide suspension of normal activity is unusual. (I was once at a British airport, trudging through security, when the two-minute silence struck; the expression on the faces of the travellers around me, as the conveyor belts shuddered to a halt, was one of international bafflement.) Only once, though, in passing, does McLoughlin refer to the two-minute silence, as if discomforted by its state-sponsored formality. On the whole, she leans toward more radical forms of reticence, born of protest or despair down the centuries. “In the 2020s, as in the 1600s and 1700s, political upheavals have a silencing effect,” she writes. Of the three components of the quiet life that she cites—“traumatised silences, Stoic silences, and happy silences”—the third tends to get muscled out, at least within this book, by the other two. Thanks to McLoughlin, we are introduced to “the silences that surround transness—hiddenness, rejection, defiance of conventional categories” and to “the terrifying silences of the climate crisis.” And don’t forget the kind of silence that “fosters careful attentiveness to other non-human life-forms.” In other words, if you shout at your dog, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

There is something in “Silence: A Literary History” to suit all tastes. Whatever flavor you fancy, take a lick. “Here are embarrassing silences, controlling silences, silences that provoke outrage and sympathy, silences that shift and slip away,” McLoughlin writes. The temptation to sniff the pages for a vanilla silence or a strawberry silence is almost overwhelming. On a single page, silences are described as “variously breath-taking, poignant, consternating, hilarious and self-evidently true,” and then, a few lines on, as “saddening, breath-taking, soothing, demanding, difficult to understand and awe-inspiring.” That’s a lot of breath to take.

In terms of latitude, much of what McLoughlin chooses to investigate is silence-adjacent, as it were, rather than the genuine article. The craving for solitude and serenity, say, may be intense, but it doesn’t logically imply the shutting of one’s trap. Not all retreats are monastic, and seclusion can easily nourish a hothouse of gossip. Also, gratifying though it is that the book should avert its gaze from the literary A-list in favor of lesser-known figures, there is a discernible sleight of hand, or a hefty wrench, as they are levered into place. The most entertaining of these is undoubtedly Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, who died in 1673, at the age of fifty, leaving more than twenty volumes of poems, plays, and essays. It’s true that she called herself “a Monster for Silence,” and that she wrote a play titled “The Lady Contemplation” (1662), but she was, in the flesh, the quintessence of volubility—one of those people who, by her own account, gabble “so Much, and Fast, as none can Understand what they Say, or would Say, Indeed, so Fast, as they make neither Stop, nor Distinction.” Hark to the gulping of those commas. “Cavendish had chutzpah,” McLoughlin declares, and it’s hard to disagree, but let’s be frank: one thing the Duchess did not possess was a talent for keeping mum.

Cartoon by Jared Nangle

With Shakespeare, predictably, McLoughlin is on firmer ground. We are alerted to the startling scene in “Coriolanus” when the hero addresses his wife as if she were an abstract noun: “My gracious silence, hail!” She does not reply. (Think of the options for an actress here. Should she modestly lower her gaze, obeying the salutation, or flinch, or freeze the guy with a fierce glare?) McLoughlin’s most searching work is inspired by “The Winter’s Tale,” whose concluding scene unfolds on a plane of the miraculous. Years after Leontes, a king contorted by jealousy, has ordered that his wife, the blameless Hermione, be put to death, a curtain is drawn back to reveal what appears to be a statue of her. It stirs, and mutely comes to life. “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating,” Leontes says. When Hermione speaks at last, it is pointedly not to him but to their daughter. All the more delightful, therefore, to learn from McLoughlin of an early-nineteenth-century production of the play in which Leontes was dressed as Napoleon—boo, hiss!—and his marmoreal queen as an English lady, nobly greeting him with a diss.