Description

Love defies all obstacles in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 story Ligeia, though not in the way you might think. The tale’s narrator, a young man, is deeply in love with his beautiful wife Ligeia. She is bold and intelligent, a most unusual woman. Tragically, Ligeia dies suddenly one night. Before she breathes her last, Ligeia makes a cryptic statement to her devastated husband about the difference between life and death being a matter of sheer willpower. Not taking much comfort in his wife’s last words, the inconsolable man buries her and moves abroad. Years later, he comes to marry another woman, although not with the same sense of passion and connection that he enjoyed with Ligeia. When his second wife, Rowena, also dies unexpectedly, the narrator sadly wraps her cold and lifeless body in cloth, in preparation for the grave. To his great amazement, however, Rowena’s body seems to stir, as though somehow coming back to life. As only the bravest of readers will find, the narrator is in for a surprise that can only be called out of this world.

About the Author

Soon after his birth in Boston, Massachusetts, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) lost both of his parents. The young Poe went to live with a couple from Virginia, where he went to school and eventually to college. Poe only briefly attended university before dropping out to embark on a short-lived stint in the military. While still quite young, Poe published his first book of poems, Tamerlane, and discovered that in writing, he had found direction for his life. Poe began to produce short stories and non-fiction prose for various publications in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Over the years, his work enjoyed increasing popularity. In the 1830s, Poe wrote many of his most famous works, including some of the very first examples of detective fiction, a genre that he is credited with inventing. His gothic tales of murder and mystery, among them The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Masque of the Red Death, thrilled readers in America and Europe. Poe’s poetry was also well received in his lifetime, and he published what is perhaps his most famous poem, The Raven, in 1845. Almost as if it was a strange tale of his own making, Poe’s untimely death continues to be the subject of much speculation to this day. In the middle of the night in October of 1849, Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore in a delirious and weakened state. Wearing clothes that did not belong to him and calling out to an unidentified person named “Reynolds,” Poe died in a Baltimore hospital a few days later. Poe’s legend lives on today, with readers all over the world delighting in his enigmatic and haunting tales and devoted fans regularly paying their respects at his gravesite in Baltimore.

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Opening Lines (Experimental)

And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. ...