Through August and into September, Emily Brontë watched her brother kill himself, not with a pistol shot to his head or hanging with a rope, as he had threatened, but with drink. He mostly stopped eating, and what he did manage to consume wasn’t absorbed because his body was shutting down. A lung ailment, surely tuberculosis, prevalent in Haworth at the time, also plagued him, making everything worse. His broken heart from his great love, Lydia Robinson, was, to his mind, reason enough to die. (He had heard she was planning to marry someone of her class.)Article continues after advertisement
But one wonders if he would have found some other excuse to abuse his body. Emily and her siblings had read for years in the newspaper of those who shot themselves, cut their own throats, and swallowed poison. There was Ellen’s brother William Nussey’s self-drowning in the Thames. Fictional renderings of suicide had been a Brontë staple for a good while: Jane Eyre has Bertha Mason throwing herself off the roof of Thornfield Hall to her death. In Wuthering Heights, both Catherine and Heathcliff die in part by willing themselves into the grave—so much so there is worry that they won’t be allowed burial in the churchyard. (Heathcliff says of Hindley Earnshaw when he drinks himself to death: “That fool should be buried at the crossroads, without ceremony of any kind.”) Branwell’s sisters wrote about it, but he lived it. In a way, he acted out an Angrian adventure, rakishly dying for love. He was his own true-life tragedy.
