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A character in And Then There Were None

Emily Brent

The righteous elderly spinster who knits through the accusations, and who once turned a pregnant maid out of her house.

What they want

To be in the right, and to be seen to be.

The book

And Then There Were NoneAgatha Christie, 1939

Ten strangers on an island off Devon, a nursery rhyme on the wall, and no detective coming to save anyone.

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At a glance

In the book
Spinster of sixty-five, invited by a half-remembered acquaintance
Charged with
The death of Beatrice Taylor, her dismissed maid
Where she appears
Chapters 1 to 11

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Emily Brent is sixty-five, upright, and certain. She came because a letter from a woman she vaguely remembered offered a free holiday. She reads her Bible, knits, and disapproves of the other guests. The record charges her with the death of Beatrice Taylor, a maid she dismissed for being pregnant, who drowned herself in a river.

She does not deny it. She says the girl brought it on herself, and she means it. The book gives her a private thought or two in which something moves behind the certainty, and then it closes the door again.

How Emily Brent Is Portrayed

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • The knittingGrey wool, worked through every crisis, including the reading of the record.
  • The BibleRead aloud in her room at night; the passage about the wicked falling into their own pit.
  • The verdict on BeatriceThe girl was wicked and destroyed herself, she says, and the death was not on her conscience.
  • The bearingRigid, thin-lipped, and offended by Marston's drinking and Vera's calm alike.
  • The dreamOne morning she feels she has been dreaming of the drowned girl, and is annoyed at herself.
  • The breakfast tableLeft alone in the dining room, she does not answer when they come back for her.
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Emily Brent dies at the breakfast table from an injection of cyanide, given with a hypodermic from Armstrong's case while she sat drugged. A bee on the window pane matched the rhyme. She was the fifth.

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