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6. Virginia Woolf – drowning

Leaving Leonard Woolf what must rank as one of the most heartbreaking farewells (“You have given me the greatest possible happiness,” she told him. “You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came…”), on 28 March 1941, after filling her pockets with stones, Virginia walked into the river Ouse, near their home, Monks House, in the village of Rodmell in Sussex, and drowned herself.

7. Ernest Hemingway – gunshot

Hemingway was a writer with an interest in the question of suicide, a question which he eventually answered by blowing his brains out, although there is good reason to believe that the electro-shock therapy he received as treatment for his depression, and which left his memory and his ability to write in ruins, was what finally sent him over the edge.

8. Sylvia Plath – gassing

On the night of Sunday 11 February 1963, after leaving them glasses of milk and slices of bread for breakfast, although they were too young to feed themselves, Sylvia opened the window of her children’s room in her maisonette at 23 Fitzroy Road, in the Primrose Hill area of North London. Then she carefully sealed off her kitchen door on the floor below with towels and adhesive tape, left a note on the pram to call her doctor, laid out a cloth for a pillow, turned on the gas and put her head deep inside the oven.

9. Anne Sexton - gassed herself in her car

Divorced, living alone, estranged from friends and family, she had been emptied by her misery, and her alcoholism had deadened her creativity. Her suicide, though not unexpected was a surprise. There was no note, no warning. After a final lunch with her long time friend Maxine Kumin, at which she seemed normal, at least for her, Anne, got into her car in her garage and turned on the ignition. The radio was playing. It was the act, her therapist wrote, of a lonely and despairing alcoholic.” In a tribute to her in the New York Times, Erica Jong wrote, “Anne Sexton killed herself because it is too painful to live in this world without numbness, and she had no numbness at all.”

10. Yukio Mishima – hara-kiri

On 25 November 1970, before a literally captive audience, Mishima performed hara-kiri. His lover and disciple Masakatsu Morita, who would also attempt hara-kiri, after several attempts failed to decapitate Mishima as planned, leaving incomplete the kaishakunin part of the ritual, aimed to relieve the agony of disembowelment. Both received their finishing touches at the hands and sword of a third member of Mishima’s Tatenokai (Shield Society), a kind of private army that Mishima hoped would be a model for a new, right-wing Japan, recapturing the samurai glories of old.

Extracted from The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters by Gary Lachman, published by Dedalus on February 7, 2008, priced at £9.99.

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