Eveline Hutchins’s suicide attempt

Eveline Hutchins’s suicide attempt is a private crisis that exposes the depth of her distress while ending short of an attempt to take the poison. After she falls asleep over an unfinished poem, she wakes at dawn and turns the bottle into a promise of possible future escape—a decision that gives her temporary relief but does not settle the misery behind it.

Background and Distress

During a summer spent reading and imagining stories about herself and Sally Emerson, Eveline also experienced recurring physical discomfort and distressing thoughts about people’s bodies. Her sisters Adelaide and Margaret offered advice about her monthly trouble, but she did not tell them how deeply it troubled her. Instead, she searched encyclopedias and dictionaries for anatomical terms, including “uterus,” trying to understand an experience she found upsetting.

The Night of the Crisis

One night, Eveline decided she could no longer endure how filthy and horrid everything seemed. She searched the bathroom medicine chest and found a bottle marked POISON, containing a laudanum compound. Before dying, she wanted to write a poem; she felt the prospect of death in musical terms, but could not make the rhymes work. She eventually fell asleep with her head on the paper, and the episode ends without her taking the poison.

Dawn and Aftermath

At dawn, Eveline woke hunched over the table by her window, stiff and cold in her thin nightgown. She returned to bed shivering, then promised herself she would keep the bottle and use it to kill herself if life again seemed too filthy and horrid. That resolution made her feel better. The immediate outcome is therefore neither an enacted suicide nor a recovery: the retained poison becomes a private contingency, and the relief comes from believing that an escape remains available.