In August, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a quiet stretch at Asheham, the country house that she and her husband, Leonard, rented in rural Sussex. “We’ve been practically alone, which has a very spiritual effect upon the mind,” Woolf wrote to a friend, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell. “No gossip, no malevolence, no support from one’s fellow creatures.” After six months spent in such isolation, Woolf quipped, “I should be a kind of Saint, and Leonard an undoubted prophet. We should shed virtue on people as we walked along the roads.” Alas, any pretensions to holiness had been dispelled by the arrival of house guests the previous evening: “I had such a bath of the flesh that I am far from unspotted this morning. We gossiped for 5 hours.”

To be human, as Woolf knew, is to talk about other humans. We all gossip, and those who don’t are either lying or dead. It’s true that few people would be proud to be thought of as a gossip—the label is too definitive, too judgmental, singed with implications of sluttish secret-hawking and moral incontinence. Yet, at the ring of the phone or the ping of the group chat, our hearts leap at the hope of some enticing morsel, delivered hot. Gossip entertains, and it also sustains. In Jane Austen’s novel “Persuasion,” the sober heroine, Anne Elliot, pays a visit to Mrs. Smith, a former classmate who is now a penniless widow, confined to her home by illness. In spite of these misfortunes, Mrs. Smith is remarkably sunny, owing, in part, to a nurse who supplements her medical ministrations with news of the outside world. “Call it gossip, if you will, but when Nurse Rooke has half an hour’s leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable: something that makes one know one’s species better,” Mrs. Smith says. Anne looks for a moral; this Rooke must be bolstering her friend with examples of “heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation,” and so on. But Mrs. Smith wants to hear about “the latest modes of being trifling and silly.” She doesn’t like gossip because it improves her. She likes it because it is fun.

“We gossip not only because we can but because we have to,” Kelsey McKinney writes in her new book, “You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip” (Grand Central). Where Woolf comically cast the propensity to gossip as a sin, and Austen slyly rendered it as a foible, McKinney, a journalist, sincerely declares it to be a virtue. “Without the self-awareness gained by gossiping, we would become husks of ourselves, so uninterested in the world around us that we become separated from it entirely,” she warns.

McKinney is no husk. She is the co-creator and, until recently, the host of “Normal Gossip,” a popular podcast devoted to sharing mildly outré stories about strangers. (“Normal” means that the show is concerned with the business of regular people.) McKinney’s audience is large, but gossip thrives best in intimacy; it wants a cupped ear, not an arena. To bridge the gap, each episode features a guest who serves as a stand-in for the rest of us AirPodded eavesdroppers, gasping in dread and delight as McKinney recounts anecdotes of varying degrees of intrigue and scandal from the perspective of an unwitting protagonist: the grad student who suspects an affair between two members of her cohort, say, or the woman who worries that her father, an amateur cultivator of orchids, is falling victim to a scammer. The pleasure is in McKinney’s elaborately drawn-out telling, laced with humor and digression. She has a rich laugh and an easy complicity with her guests. “How are you feeling?” she asks, with a sympathetic wince, as she brings a story to its crescendo.

McKinney likes to prompt her guests to characterize their “relationship” with gossip. Most express ready enthusiasm. Occasionally, though, someone admits to squeamishness at the prospect of dissecting the doings of another person’s life, and it is those people—the skeptical, the hesitant, the embarrassed—whom McKinney sets out to win over in her book. Gossip is amusing, even salacious, yes, but she wants to show that it is serious, too. Alongside discussions of TMZ, “Mean Girls,” and the “Real Housewives” franchise, we get sprinklings of science: citations of philosophers, anthropologists, neuroscientists, ethicists, and one senior lecturer in “the propagation of narratives and cognitive bias” at the University of Winchester. Studies are described, the neocortex invoked. McKinney’s big point is that gossip is a fundamentally human behavior, and she does not tire of making it. “While other species can communicate with one another, none can weave tales the way we can,” she tells us, lest we credit dolphins as nature’s true raconteurs. That distinction may not last long. McKinney reports that she asked ChatGPT to dish dirt, only to be turned down. “I understand your curiosity, but I must reiterate that I’m here to provide respectful and informative assistance,” the program primly informed her. When I recently tried the same trick, ChatGPT was over its qualms. “I love a little bit of gossip!” it announced. Artificial intelligence is gaining on us. At least we’ll go down talking shit.

If McKinney is at pains to stress the universality of her subject, she has cause. Gossip has been considered the province of half of humanity—the female one—for such a long time that it is surprising to learn that it wasn’t always so. At its root, the word means “god-sibling” and once signified any person, man or woman, connected by baptism rather than blood: a close friend, someone with whom you’d happily trade secrets. In Renaissance England, the noun “gossip” came to refer to a woman’s female friends who were invited to be present at a birth. McKinney supplies a ditty (“At Child-bed when the Gossips meet / Fine Stories we are told; And if they get a cup too much, / Their Tongues they cannot hold”) that makes giving birth in the age before antibiotics and epidurals—or, at least, attending one—sound improbably great. Not to men, however. Exclusion bred suspicion. In his dictionary, Dr. Johnson defined a gossip as “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in.” From there, it was a skip and a hop to the 1811 definition, in the Oxford English Dictionary, of gossip as “idle talk, trifling or groundless rumour, tittle-tattle,” which more or less stands to this day.

If women were uniquely susceptible to idle talk, explanations must be supplied. One was biological. In “Gossip,” her 1985 study of the subject, the literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks quotes an eighteenth-century manual that maintained that women’s brains are “of a soft Consistence,” thus producing “the Weakness of their Minds.” Another was religious. To Christians, the original gossip was Eve, who, Spacks says, “brought sin into the world by unwise speaking and unwise listening.” Everything was fine until a woman passed on a story told to her by a snake.

The soft-brain theory has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but scriptural notions have proved harder to dismiss. McKinney grew up attending an evangelical church in Texas where she was taught that her tendency to gossip would keep her from holiness. On her bedroom mirror, she inscribed Ephesians 4:29: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building up others according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” But her compulsion would not be suppressed. No matter that she wasn’t out to cause harm; any talk about a person not present was verboten. From the pulpit, pastors fulminated against the “woman’s sin” for spreading lies and discord.

McKinney left the Church long ago. Looking back, she concludes that its leaders did not merely despise gossip; in fact, they feared it. She points to cases like those of Bill Hybels, a founder of Willow Creek Community Church, based in Illinois, who was forced to resign in 2018 after being credibly accused of sexual misconduct, and Paige Patterson, the former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Texas, who was ousted from his position the same year after more than two thousand female congregants signed a petition denouncing him for counselling abused wives to pray for their husbands. (Hybels denies the allegations.) Convincing women that God will punish them if they don’t hold their tongues is one way to try to prevent such dark truths from getting out.

Certainly, Christianity has no monopoly on the prohibition of gossip. In Islam, McKinney tells us, there is a difference in degree between buhtan (slander), ghibah (backbiting), and namimah (malicious gossip); none is advised. Jewish law holds that a person who hears gossip—lashon hara, literally “the evil tongue”—is as much at fault as one who tells it. A few months before the #MeToo movement began, in the summer of 2017, the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith published a blog post called “In Defense of Lashon Hara: Why Gossip Is a Feminist Imperative.” Like McKinney, the post’s writer, Rachel Sandalow-Ash, concluded that women’s speech had been unfairly maligned by powerful men who would prefer that their doings not be discussed. By encouraging women to share information that might protect them, be it about a community leader or a college classmate known to play fast and loose with sexual consent, she argued, gossip actually fulfilled the Jewish imperative “to create a more just world.”

So gossip, in the service of truthtelling, can act as a check on power, and as a source of solidarity and irreverence for those who lack it. “Tea,” that now ubiquitous term, originated in the Black drag-ball scene. McKinney writes of contemporary whisper networks; Spacks cites an account of women in a harem whose chat is flavored with “satire, ridicule, and disrespect for males and the ideals of the male world.” That could double as a description of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who delights in the company of the woman she calls (in a modern English translation) “my gossip”:

For had my husband pissed against a wall,
Or done a thing that might have cost his life,
To her and to another worthy wife,
And to my niece whom I loved always well,
I would have told it—every bit I’d tell,
And did so, many and many a time, knows God,
Which made his face full often red and hot
For utter shame; he blamed himself that he
Had told me of so deep a privity.

Poor husband, to be so humiliated! But the Wife of Bath is unrepentant. She enjoys gossiping—and it is not her only enjoyment. Gossip, like sex, is an intimate, sensuous pleasure, most satisfying when the giver is attentive to the receiver. “I didn’t just want to hear gossip,” McKinney writes, of her younger, churchgoing self. “I wanted to take it in my hands and mold it, rearrange the punch lines and the reveals until I could get the timing right enough that my friends in the cafeteria would gasp.” The molding, the gasping—no wonder the pastors weren’t thrilled.

But what of the gossiped-about? They can’t all be tyrants, criminals, and creeps. If gossip can subvert norms, it can also enforce them; remember high school? To be discussed by others can confer status, make you part of the club. “I heard they got pinned!” the teen-agers of “Bye Bye Birdie” sing on the phone to one another as—hallelujah!—another boy-girl couple is minted in their midst. And it can just as easily strip status away. Women, vilified as gossip’s venomous purveyors, are also its frequent victims. Think of Hester Prynne, with her scarlet letter, or Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” whose hope of securing her future among New York’s upper crust is dashed by a rumor that she is having an affair with the husband of the wealthy socialite Bertha Dorset, planted by Bertha herself. By the time Lily shows up in the gossip rag “Town Talk,” she’s as good as dead.

McKinney knows that gossip can be weaponized as “an extralegal solution to enforce the community’s ideals and powers,” and the legality is not always so extra. East Germany, Soviet Russia—these are places where whisperings found their way into police files. And what was the House Un-American Activities Committee but one big, malevolent exercise in gossip-mongering? McKinney notes that the actress Jean Seberg’s career was derailed when the Los Angeles Times ran a blind item suggesting that she was pregnant by a Black Panther; Newsweek subsequently published her name. The story turned out to be an invention of the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO program. Her baby was born premature, and died. So, eventually, did Seberg, at forty, in what was ruled a probable suicide.

Some might claim that even casual gossip can be harmful. “Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me,” Roland Barthes writes in “A Lover’s Discourse.” Gossip, Barthes says, is by nature akin to murder. To refer to someone in the third person—“a wicked pronoun,” he calls it—is to render the person absent. When he hears his beloved spoken of by others, “it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language.” You might think that Barthes is concerned with slander, but no. What he feels is pure keep-my-wife’s-name-out-of-your-mouth possessiveness: “I do not want the Other to speak of you.” He has a point. There is an estranging, witness-to-your-funeral quality to being talked about by others, as if you were no longer the subject of your own life but merely an object to be ogled in someone else’s.