Textual Resurrection: Suicidal Women in Eighteenth-Century Media

Abstract: Suicides, both real and fictional, have been the object of much criticism in studies of eighteenth-century literature and culture, but the notes of suicidal women have received insufficient critical attention. This essay takes the women's suicide notes that were published in the anglophone press as its key objects of study and sets them alongside the fictional suicidal situations in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa to identify what allowed women in the era to break through the barriers preventing public notice and achieve notice in the press when, as other studies have shown, the publication of men's suicide notes in the period was much more common.