"A Rose for Emily"- Timeline

Emily was born in 1864

1864

In the text we found that she died at 74 years old and we just subtracted that to find birth year.

She remits her taxes in the town of Jefferson.

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1894

"Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor — he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron — remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity."

Emily's father dies.

1894

So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart — the one we believed would marry her — had deserted her. After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.

Emily meets homer

1895

"A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man — a young man then — going in and out with a market basket."

Homer's death

1895

I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Judge Stevens said. “It’s probably just a snake or a rat that man of hers killed in the yard. I’ll speak to him about it.”

Smell

1895

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings.

Emily buys rat poison.

I want arsenic.”


The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. “Why, of course,” the druggist said. “If that’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for.”

1895

Emily gives China painting lessons.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting.

1901

Emily's death

1935

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her.