Literature that attempts to talk about God must point the reader to what language can’t express – to silence, in short

A literary history of silence might sound like a paradox. Kate McLoughlin, who became a professor of English literature after a career as a government lawyer, admits that most people react to her book’s title with a double-take: “Silence? In literature? Surely silence is a nothingness, an affront to the communication of both rational argument and strong emotion: literature’s opposite, even its anathema?”

In this momentous volume, McLoughlin sets out to disprove this idea by rewriting the history of 12 centuries of English literature from the perspective of its gaps and pauses, what’s not heard instead of what is. Examples range from a speaker’s self-awareness of his own restless mind in a meditative Old English poem, all the way up to our twenty-first century urge to switch off our devices and “touch grass” to escape from the cacophony of online voices.

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