"Romantic Suicide of a Young Lady"


An article entitled “Romantic Suicide of a Young Lady” was published on Saturday, December 11, 1880 in The Illustrated Police News. The article appears alongside an illustration depicting a woman floating above a body of water, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed, and her head tilted upward. The text concerns the drowning of a young woman whose body was discovered in the Thames and whose identity was unknown at the time of publication. The inclusion of an adjective in the title of an article to sensationalize an event is relatively typical of Victorian newspapers, but there is something particularly disturbing about the description of a suicide as “romantic.” Not only is there nothing in the article to indicate that the suicide was connected with romance (which, of course, would still make the title problematic), but the suggestion that suicide is in any way “romantic” is, at the very least, utterly tasteless, and at most dangerous.

It is strange, then, that the article itself is not at all concerned with the romanticization of suicide. Rather, the article is especially concerned with the way that the woman was dressed when her body was found, which, considering the fact that her identity was at this point unknown, may not seem particularly noteworthy except that the principal concern of the article seems to be that the woman was dressed in “male attire.” Included in the text are mentions of the specific male-associated articles she was found wearing, such as an 18-carat gold “gentleman’s ring” and gold studs, as well as a portrait of herself “in gentleman’s dress” that was found in her pocket. But perhaps most striking was a seemingly irrelevant assumption as to why she was wearing men’s clothing: “The only conjecture was that she might have been in a situation, and had run away with her master’s or son’s clothes.” It is as though the most urgent and compelling mystery of all is not the suicide itself, but rather the reason for which she was dressed like a man.

The article and the accompanying illustration raise important questions about the ways in which the death of a woman is represented in the Victorian media. For instance, why does the illustration appear to glorify the act of suicide, or even suggest that the experience is pleasurable for the woman? And why might the article describe the suicide as “romantic” only to focus almost solely on the manliness of her attire? Perhaps the title and illustration were expected to somehow “feminize” the woman in an attempt to “demasculinize” her (“romance” connotes emotion, and emotionality is often associated with femininity). In any case, the article is undoubtedly more concerned with the peculiarity of the woman’s physical appearance than with her humanity.

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