Communicating Beyond Death: Examining Suicide Letters from England (1757–1849) and Brazil (1920–1929)

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which people imagined their suicide letters to be tools of posthumous communication, in both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, and early twentieth-century Pernambuco. In examining letters from two places with very different religious traditions; at times of very divergent legal approaches to suicide; and at important points of change, this article seeks to examine both the commonalities and cultural specificities of these letters. Using 67 English and 39 Brazilian letters, it explores the suicide letter as a form of writing. It shows that, although death literally destroyed the possibility of interpersonal exchange, its imminence could make for particularly honest epistolary expressions of emotion. It also argues that, for some writers, death was envisaged as a divide which could be breached.