Unfortunately, this book is slipshod, repetitive, and full of rambling assertions rather than fine-grained philosophical analysis. For scientific backing Jenkins relies almost exclusively on an experiment by the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher…Jenkins admits that the experiment’s methodology is flawed, heavily based on self-reports and tendentiously set up, but seems to share Fisher’s blithe expectation that “love consists of these [or, if not, some other] specific biological mechanisms”. She thus simply replicates Fisher’s question-begging confusion between identity and correlation, failing to debate just how “science can finally tell us what love really is”…..

She is similarly sprawling and inconclusive in discussing the social construction of love, offering us tantalising but discrete dabblings in vampires, the medieval humours, Sappho, Ovid, Plato and Shakespeare, while neglecting to suggest how these coalesced into the cultural love brew they became.

“I propose a new theory of romantic love,” Jenkins declares. Just as when watching an actor perform we are simultaneously aware of the actor inhabiting the character, and of the character itself, so (says Jenkins) love’s dual nature is instantiated in “ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role”. But how does that work? Jenkins never fleshes out her airy claim….

Polyamory provides a promising tuning fork for sounding the nature of romantic love, and whether focusing exclusively on one person is essential to it. Jenkins arouses expectations that she will philosophise on this and similar questions via her own feelings, but ultimately offers little in the way either of emotion or philosophy.

(Thanks to several readers for sending this along.)

(Prof. Jenkins now joins Colin McGinn in being a repeat target of wicked book reviews; unlike McGinn, I am not aware that she has written any however!)