Suicide Century

I liked this book more because of its strange and intriguing subject than the quality of Andrew Bennett's scholarship, but I owe him props for exploring this difficult literary terrain.

My favorite chapter is the author's comparison of the poets Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith—I'm grateful for the introduction to Smith. There's a movie called Stevie (1978) with Glenda Jackson about her life and poetry, which is on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZUqYFJvo8Q

Andrew Bennett explains the explosion of suicide in the plots of modern novels here: “The increase in the cultural prominence of suicide in eighteenth-century narratives is thus understood as contingent upon the era's emphasis on bourgeois individualism and on the development of the “modern” sense of autonomous subjecthood on which the novel feeds and that the form itself promulgates.”