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Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe
Virginia Poe, image created after her death.
Born	August 22, 1822 Baltimore, Maryland
Died	January 30, 1847(1847-01-30) (aged 24) Fordham, New York
Spouse	Edgar Allan Poe

Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe (August 22, 1822 – January 30, 1847), born Virginia Eliza Clemm, was the wife of Edgar Allan Poe. The couple were first-cousins and married when Virginia was only 13 and Poe was 27.

The two lived together off and on along with other family members for several years before their marriage. A few years after their wedding, Poe was involved in a substantial scandal involving Frances Sargent Osgood and Elizabeth F. Ellet. The scandal involved rumors about alleged amorous improprieties on her husband's part. She had previously become sick with tuberculosis. She struggled with this illness for several years before her death in January 1847 at age 24. The scandal still on her mind, on her deathbed she claimed that Ellet was her murderer.

Virginia's disease and eventual death had a substantial impact on her husband. In his poetry and prose, dying young women appear as a frequent motif, possibly inspired by Virginia.

Biography

Early life

Poe family tree

Virginia Eliza Clemm was born on August 22, 1822 and named after an older sister who died as an infant only ten days earlier. Her father William Clemm, Jr. was a hardware merchant in Baltimore. He had married Maria Poe, Virginia's mother, as a second wife in July 12, 1817, after the death of his first wife, Maria's first cousin Harriet. He had five children from his previous marriage and had three with Maria. After his death in 1826, he left very little to the family and relatives offered no financial support because they had opposed the marriage. Maria supported the family as best she could by sewing, taking in borders, and with an annual $240 pension granted to her mother Elizabeth Cairnes, who was paralyzed and bedridden. Elizabeth received this pension on behalf of her late husband, "General" David Poe, a former quartermaster in Maryland who had loaned money to the state.

Edgar Poe first met his first-cousin Virginia in August 1829, four months after his discharge from the Army. She was seven at the time. In 1832, the family — made up of Elizabeth, Maria, Virginia, Virginia's brother Henry, and Poe's older brother William Henry Leonard — were able to use Elizabeth's pension to rent a home at what was then 3 Amity Street in Baltimore. William Henry Leonard died on August 1, 1831. Poe joined the household in 1833 and smitten by a neighbor named Mary Devereaux. The young Virginia served as a messenger between the two, at one point retrieving a lock of Devereaux's hair as a gift to Poe. Elizabeth Cairnes Poe died on July 7, 1835, effectively ending the family's income and making their financial situation even more dire. Henry died around this time, sometime before 1836, leaving Virginia as Maria Clemm's only surviving child.

Poe left the destitute family behind and moved to Richmond, Virginia, taking a job at the Southern Literary Messenger in August 1835. While away from Baltimore, another cousin, Neilson Poe, the husband of Virginia's half-sister Josephine Clemm, heard Edgar was considering marrying Virginia. He offered to take her and have her educated. His offer was an attempt at preventing her marriage to Edgar at such a young age, though he suggested the option be reconsidered later. Edgar called Neilson, the owner of a newspaper in Baltimore, Maryland, his "bitterest enemy" and interpreted his cousin's actions as an attempt to breaking his connection with Virginia. On August 29, 1835, Edgar wrote an emotional letter to Maria, saying he was "blinded with tears while writing", pleading that she allow Virginia to make her own decision. Encouraged by his employment at the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe offered to provide financially for Maria, Virginia and Henry if they moved to Richmond.

Marriage

Virginia and Edgar's marriage certificate

Marriage plans were confirmed and Poe returned to Baltimore to file for a marriage license on September 22, 1835. They may have quietly gotten married as well, though accounts are unclear. Their only public ceremony was in Richmond on May 16, 1836, when they were married by a Presbyterian minister named Rev. Amasa Converse. Edgar was 27 and Virginia was 13, though the two listed her age as 21. This marriage bond was filed in Richmond and included an affidavit from Thomas W. Cleland confirming her alleged age. The ceremony was held in the evening at the home of a Mrs. James Yarrington, the owner of the boarding house in which Edgar, Virginia, and Virginia's mother Maria Clemm were staying. Yarrington helped Maria Clemm bake the wedding cake and prepared a wedding meal. The couple had a short honeymoon in Petersburg, Virginia.

Debate has raged regarding how unusual this pairing was based on their age and blood relationship. Noted Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn says it was not particularly unusual, nor was Edgar's nickname of "Sissy" or "Sis". Another Poe biographer, Kenneth Silverman, says that though their first-cousin marriage was not unusual, her young age was. It has been suggested that Clemm and Poe had a brother–sister relationship. Scholars, including Marie Bonaparte, have read many of Poe's works as autobiographical and have concluded that Virginia died a virgin because she and her husband never consummated their marriage, especially if assuming Virginia is the title character in the poem "Annabel Lee," a "maiden... by the name of Annabel Lee." Poe biographer Joseph Wood Krutch suggested that Poe did not need women "in the way that normal men need them", but only as a source of inspiration and care. Friends of Poe suggested that they did not share a bed for at least the first two years of their marriage but, when she turned 16, began a "normal" married life until her illness.

Virginia and Edgar were by all accounts a happy and devoted couple. Poe's one-time employer George Rex Graham wrote of their relationship: "His love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty." She, in turn, by many contemporary accounts, nearly idolized her husband and showed her love in an acrostic poem she composed, dated February 14, 1846:

Ever with thee I wish to roam -
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there -
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee -
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

Osgood/Ellet scandal

The "tattling of many tongues" in Virginia's Valentine poem was a reference to actual incidents. Poe had begun a flirtation with Frances Sargent Osgood, a married 34-year old poet. Virginia was aware of their friendship and may have encouraged it. She often invited Osgood to visit them at home, imagining that she had a "restraining" effect on her husband, who had made a promise to "give up the use of stimulants" and was never drunk in her presence.

At the same time, another poet, Elizabeth F. Ellet, became enamored with Poe and became jealous of Osgood. Though, in a letter to Sarah Helen Whitman, he called her love for him "loathsome" and he "could do nothing but repel [it] with scorn", he printed many of her poems to him in the Broadway Journal while he was its editor. Ellet was known for being meddlesome and vindictive and, while visiting the Poe household in late January 1846, she saw one of Osgood's personal letters to Poe. According to Ellet, Virginia pointed out "fearful paragraphs" in Osgood's letter. Ellet contacted Osgood and suggested she should be fearful of her indiscretions and ask Poe to return her letters. motivated either by jealousy or by a desire to cause scandal. On her behalf, Osgood sent Margaret Fuller and Anne Lynch Botta to ask Poe to return her letters. Angered by their interference, Poe called them "Busy-bodies" and suggested that Ellet had better "look after her own letters", suggesting indiscretion on her part. One such letter includes the imperfect German Ich habe einen Brief fur Sie—wollen Sie gefalligst heute lassen? One part translates to "Call for it at her residence this evening", a phrase presumably meant to be seductive, though Poe ignored it or did not understand it. He then gathered up these letters from Ellet and left them at her house.

Though these letters had already been returned to her, Ellet asked her brother "to demand of me the letters". Her brother, Colonel William Lummis did not believe that Poe had already returned them and threatened to kill him. In order to defend himself, Poe requested a pistol from Thomas Dunn English. English, a friend of Poe and minor writer who was a trained doctor and lawyer, did not believe that Poe had already returned the letters and, in fact, believed they had never existed. The easiest way out of the predicament, he said, "was a retraction of unfounded charges." Angered at being called a liar, Poe pushed English into a fistfight. Poe claimed he was triumphant in the fight, though English claimed otherwise, but it is believed that Poe's face was badly cut by one of English's rings. In Poe's version, he said, "I gave E. a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death." Either way, the fight further sparked gossip over the Osgood affair.

Osgood's husband stepped in and threatened to sue Ellet unless she formally apologized for what she was implying. She retracted her statements in a letter to Osgood saying, "The letter shown me by Mrs Poe must have been a forgery created by Poe himself. She put all the blame on Poe, suggesting the incident was because Poe was "intemperate and subject to acts of lunacy." Ellet spread the rumor of Poe's insanity, which was taken up by other enemies of Poe and reported in newspapers. The St. Louis Reveille reported: "A rumor is in circulation in New York, to the effect that Mr. Edgar A. Poe, the poet and author, has been deranged, and his friends are about to place him under the charge of Dr. Brigham of the Insane Retreat at Utica." The scandal eventually died down when Osgood reunited with her husband. Virginia, however, had been very affected by the scandal. Anonymous letters about the alleged indiscretions of her husband were sent to Virginia as early as July 1845. It is presumed that Ellet was involved with these letters and Virginia was so disturbed by them that she allegedly declared on her deathbed that "Mrs. E. had been her murderer."

Illness

Virginia Poe's bedroom at the Poe Cottage in the Bronx, New York, where she died.

Virginia had developed tuberculosis, first seen in an incident some time in the middle of January 1842. While singing and playing the piano, Virginia began to bleed from the mouth, though Poe said she merely "ruptured a blood-vessel". Her health declined and she became an invalid, which drove Edgar into a deep depression, especially as she occasionally showed signs of improvement. In a letter to friend John Ingram, Edgar described his resulting mental state:

"Each time I felt all the agonies of her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

Her condition may have been what prompted the Poe family to move in the hopes of finding a healthier environment for her. They moved several times throughout Philadelphia in the early 1840s, their last home in that city now preserved as the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Spring Garden.

In May 1846, the family (Edgar, Virginia, and her mother, Maria) moved to a small cottage in Fordham, New York, about fourteen miles outside the city. In the only surviving letter from Poe to Virginia, dated June 12, 1846, he urged her to remain optimistic: "Keep up your heart in all hopelessness, and trust yet a little longer." In his recent loss of the Broadway Journal, the only magazine Poe ever owned, he said, "I should have lost my courage but for you—my darling little wife you are my greatest and only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory and ungrateful life." By November of that year, her condition was hopeless. Her symptoms included irregular appetite, flushed cheeks, unstable pulse, night sweats, high fever, sudden chills, shortness of breath, chest pains, coughing and spitting up blood.

Nathaniel Parker Willis, a friend of Poe's and an influential editor, along with others published an announcement on December 30, 1846, requesting help for the family, though his facts were not entirely correct:

Illness of Edgar A. Poe. —We regret to learn that this gentleman and his wife are both dangerously ill with the consumption, and that the hand of misfortune lies heavily on their temporal affairs. We are sorry to mention the fact that they are so far reduced as to be barely able to obtain the necessaries of life. That is, indeed, a hard lot, and we do hope that the friends and admirers of Mr. Poe will come promptly to his assistance in his bitterest hour of need.

Willis, who had not corresponded with Poe for two years and had since lost his own wife, was one of his greatest supporters in this period. He sent Poe and his wife an inspirational Christmas book, The Marriage Ring; or How to Make a Home Happy.

The announcement was similar to one made for Poe's mother Eliza Poe during her last stages of tuberculosis. Other newspapers picked up on the announcement, including this one: "Great God! ...is it possible, that the literary people of the Union, will let poor Poe perish by starvation and lean faced beggary in New York? For so we are led to believe, from frequent notices in the papers, stating that Poe and his wife are both down upon a bed of misery, death, and disease, with not a ducat in the world. The Saturday Evening Post asserted that Virginia was in a hopeless condition and that Poe had no friends. "It is said that Edgar A. Poe is lying dangerously with brain fever, and that his wife is in the last stages of consumption—they are without money and without friends." Even Hiram Fuller, who Poe had previously sued for libel, attempted to garner support for Poe and his wife in the New York Mirror. "We, whom he has quarrelled with, will take the lead", he wrote.

Virginia was tended to by 25-year old Marie Louise Shew. Shew knew medical care from her father, a doctor. She provided Virginia with a comforter as her only other cover was Edgar's old military cloak.

Death

Memorial marker to Virginia Clemm, Maria Clemm, and Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore, Maryland

On January 29, 1847, Poe wrote to Marie Louise Shew: "My poor Virginia still lives, although failing fast and now suffering much pain." Virginia died the next day, January 30, 1847, after five years of illness. Shew helped in organizing her funeral, even purchasing her coffin. Shew may have also painted the only image of Virginia, a water color done after her death. Her death was announced in several newspapers. The New York Daily Tribune and the Herald on February 1, 1847 carried the simple obituary: "On Saturday, the 30th ult., of pulmonary consumption, in the 25th year of her age, VIRGINIA ELIZA, wife of EDGAR A. POE." Though now buried at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, Virginia was originally buried in a vault owned by the Valentine family, owners of the Fordham cottage, on the day of her funeral February 2, 1847

In 1875, the same year Edgar was reburied, the cemetery in which she lay was destroyed and her remains were almost forgotten. An early Poe biographer, William Gill, gathered her bones and stored them in a box he hid under his bed. Gill's story was reported in the Boston Herald twenty-seven years after the event. Gill says that he had visited the Fordham cemetery in 1883 at exactly the moment that the sexton Dennis Valentine held Virginia's bones in his shovel, ready to throw them away as unclaimed. Gill took the remains and corresponded with Neilson Poe and John Prentiss Poe in Baltimore, and arranged to bring the box down to be laid on Edgar's left side in a small bronze casket. Virginia's remains were finally buried with her husband's in 1885 on January 19 — the seventy-sixth anniversary of her husband's birth and nearly ten years after his current monument was erected. The same man who served as sexton during Edgar's original burial and his exhumations and reburials was also present at the rites which brought his body to rest with Virginia and Virginia's mother Maria Clemm.

Appearance

Only one image of Virginia is known to exist, painted based on her corpse. Accounts of Virginia's appearance vary. She had dark hair and violet eyes with skin so pale it was described as "pure white", causing a "bad complexion that spoiled her looks". One visitor to the Poe family noted, "the rose-tint upon her cheek was too bright", possibly a symptom of her illness. Another visitor in Fordham wrote, "Mrs. Poe looked very young; she had large black eyes, and a pearly whiteness of complexion, which was a perfect pallor. Her pale face, her brilliant eyes, and her raven hair gave her an unearthly look." That unearthly look was mentioned by others who suggested that made her look not quite human. William Gowans, who once lodged with the family, described Virginia as a woman of "matchless beauty and loveliness, her eye could match that of any houri, and her face defy the genius of a Canova to imitate". She may have been a little plump with a slight double chin. In her watercolor portrait, her eyes are shown to be hazel. Many contemporary accounts as well as modern biographers remark on her child-like appearance even in the last years of her life.

Impact and influence on Poe

Virginia's death had a strong impact on Poe. After her death Poe was deeply saddened for several months. A friend said of him, "the loss of his wife was a sad blow to him. He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all." A year after her death, he had written to a friend that he had experience the greatest evil a man can experience when, he said, "a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before" had gotten sick. While she was struggling to recover, Poe turned to alcohol after abstaining for quite some time. How often and how much he drank is a controversial issue, debated from Poe's lifetime to more modern biographers. Poe referred to it as his own illness and found the cure to it "in the death of my wife. This I can & do endure as becomes a man—it was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair which I could not longer have endured without the total loss of reason."

Poe pursued several women after Virginia's death, including Nancy Richmond of Lowell, Massachusetts, Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence, Rhode Island, and childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster in Richmond. Even so, Frances Osgood, who Poe also attempted to woo, believed "that she [Virginia] was the only woman whom he ever loved."

References in literature

Many of Poe's works are interpreted as being partially autobiographical and much of his work is believed to reflect Virginia's long struggle with tuberculosis and eventual death. The most discussed example is "Annabel Lee". The poem, which depicts a dead young bride and her mourning lover, is often assumed to have been inspired by Virginia, though other women in Poe's life are potential candidates including Frances Sargent Osgood and Sarah Helen Whitman. A similar poem, "Ulalume", is also believed to be a memorial tribute to Virginia.

Virginia is also seen in in Poe's prose. The short story "Eleonora" (1842) — which features a narrator preparing to marry his cousin, with whom he lives alongside her mother — may also reference Virginia's illness. When Poe wrote it, she had just begun to show signs of her illness. Shortly after, the couple moved to New York City by boat and Poe published "The Oblong Box" (1844). The story, which shows a man mourning over his dead young wife while transporting her corpse by boat, seems to suggest Poe's feelings over Virginia's impending death. As the ship sinks, the husband would rather die than be separated from his wife's corpse. The short story "Ligeia", with the slow, lingering death of its title character, may also be inspired by Virginia. After her death, Poe also edited his first published story, "Metzengerstein", to remove the narrator's line, "I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease." Poe's supposed insanity during her illness may also be reflected in his first-person narratives "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat", and "The Cask of Amontillado".

See also

• List of coupled cousins

References

• Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Louisiana State University Press, 1972. ISBN 0684193701.
• Moss, Sidney P. Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu. Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.
• Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. Cooper Square Press, 1992. ISBN 0684193701.
• Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson. The Literary History of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1906. ISBN 1932109455.
• Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biobraphy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 0801857309
• Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. Harper Perennial, 1991. ISBN 0060923318.

External links

• Virginia Clemm Poe at the Edgar Allan Poe Society online
• Poe Family Tree at the Edgar Allan Poe Society online
• Poe's Life: Family Tree at PoeMuseum.org

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