Suicide, the act of deliberately killing oneself, is a prominent action in many important works of literature.
According to Lorna Ruth Wiedmann, novelistic suicide patterns first emerged in the nineteenth century.
"[1] Kevin Grauke stated that suicide serves an "ambivalent rhetorical function"[2] in the works of the nineteenth-century.
Authors such as Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf include themes of suicide in their writing.
[5] "Once suicide was accepted as a common fact of society- not as a noble Roman alternative, nor as the mortal sin it had been in the Middle Ages, nor as a special cause to be pleaded or warned against- but simply as something people did, often and without much hesitation, like committing adultery, then it automatically became a common property of art."