Chapter 3, ‘Solitude and Community’, argues against the traditional dichotomising of solitude and community, shedding light on the precarious balance sought, in letter-writing, between these formative human experiences. Examining the distinctive strands of solitude, aloneness, and loneliness in the personal and creative contexts of the five letter-writers, the chapter works to expose their preoccupation with aversive isolation and the corrective found in the situatedness of solitude. How does letter-writing negotiate relations of togetherness and community for authors and artists in their creative solitude? How do solitude and togetherness coincide, or compete, in the letter writers’ experience of home and habitat, and of the natural world? Critical perspectives developed from the thought of Montaigne, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière illuminate the tensions between enabling solitude and constraining community. These tensions are assuaged, if never ultimately resolved, through forms of connected retreat. Sounding affinities between letter-writing and literature, the chapter reflects, finally, on solitude in the immanence of modernist writing.