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This book offers a history of shyness in France. In particular, it interrogates the seeming strangeness of shyness in the long nineteenth century, positing it as an everyday experience which nonetheless troubled the stories that the nation sought to tell about itself in a period of intense political and social change. Shyness threatened the narratives of natural sociability central to French thought yet could also be seen as a symbol of sensibility and striving.

The book unravels these competing perspectives by analysing a diverse range of sources from etiquette books, medical writing, and life-writing, to popular theatre and canonical fiction. It draws on techniques from the emotion history, literary studies, and the medical humanities. In revealing the neglected history of an often-trivialised experience and those who suffered with it, the book makes a significant contribution both to the history of the emotions in nineteenth-century France and to present-day shyness studies.