"A Rose for Emily" Timeline
click to edit
Emily's Birth
1861
Emily's Father's Death
"...dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, ...dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity" (Paragraph 3)
1894 (Emily was about 33 years old)
Taxes Remited
1894
"...dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor... remitted her taxes" ( Paragraph 3)
The Smell
1896
"...thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart" (Paragraph 15)
It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.
Emily Was Sick
Emily was sick for a long time as the townspeople had said and that when they saw her again she had cut her hair short.
In 1901 right before Homer came to town
Emily Buys Poison
1902
"Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say “Poor Emily,” and while the two female cousins were visiting her." ( Paragraph 33)
Homer Dies
We can assume Homer died after she bought the rat poison and when the townspeople only saw him one time when he came back and never again. We can just assume this is the year he dies.
1902
This is the year that Emily was born.
Isolation
6 Months Later
"And of Miss Emily for some time...but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets." (Paragraph 47)
"And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron." (Paragraph 47)
Collecting Taxes
(1904)
"On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff’s office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment." (Paragraph 4)
"(Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.)" ( Paragraph 14)
Isolated AGAIN.
1904-1907
"From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years," (Paragraph 49)
China Painting Lessons
1907
"...when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris’ contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity..." (Paragraph 49)
Emily Dies
1935
74 Years Old
"She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight." (Paragraph 53)
"And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her" (Paragraph 52)
She was 40
She found her sweat heart about a year after her dad died
Had A Sexual Relationship
"She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families." (Paragraph 31)
This was sometime before her father died
"They rose when she entered — a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare;...She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face... (Paragraph 6)