Through August and into September, Emily Brontë watched her brother kill himself, not with a pistol shot to his head or hanging with a rope, as he had threatened, but with drink. He mostly stopped eating, and what he did manage to consume wasn’t absorbed because his body was shutting down. A lung ailment, surely tuberculosis, prevalent in Haworth at the time, also plagued him, making everything worse. His broken heart from his great love, Lydia Robinson, was, to his mind, reason enough to die. (He had heard she was planning to marry someone of her class.) Article continues after advertisement But one wonders if he would have found some other excuse to abuse his body. Emily and her siblings had read for years in the newspaper of those who shot themselves, cut their own throats, and swallowed poison. There was Ellen’s brother William Nussey’s self-drowning in the Thames.…