This paper explores how solitude in early modern Britain was understood in gendered ways, focusing especially on women’s experiences of solitude. There has been much historical work on community and on networks, relationships, and friendships at all levels of early modern society. But in privileging these communal aspects of daily life, there has been a tendency to neglect those quieter and more transient moments that are often silenced and hidden from the historical record. What women did when they were out of company remains an overlooked topic. In most commentaries from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women were not believed to be capable of engaging in the types of productive and meaningful solitude connected to wider masculine ideals of creative genius. Yet women from the middling and upper ranks of society spent large periods of their lives alone, often distanced from friends and social relations or engaging in solitary tasks. Through examining women’s life writings, correspondence, and other personal papers, this paper explores how solitude defined different stages in women’s lives. It shows how time spent alone, as much as time spent in company, had important consequences for how women identified themselves in relation to the society that surrounded them.