Poe and Jane Locke

"[M]y extremely delicate health...and all too sensitive heart, with an irrepressible--shall I call it Genius?--struggling for recognition, if nothing more..."
-Jane E. Locke, 1850

Of all the many miscreants who helped make Poe’s last few years so painful, arguably the strangest of the lot was an otherwise nondescript Massachusetts housewife and poet named Jane Ermina Locke, whose latent talent for mayhem burst into full flower when she met Poe.

Late in 1846 reports of Poe’s distressing poverty and illness were widely circulated in the newspapers. The list of his calamities only increased when these stories brought him to the attention of 41-year-old Mrs. Locke. She was inspired to publish a poem, “An Invocation for Suffering Genius,” (“Oh Charity, where hast thou fled with heavenly lustered wing/While on her low and sorrowing bed genius lies suffering?”) and in February 1847, several weeks after the death of Poe's wife Virginia, she sent him a warm expression of condolence. All of her attentions were likely inspired by the hope of utilizing him to further her own literary career, which, to her own great frustration, had failed to convince the world of her "Genius."

A correspondence was established between them, but as only three letters of his and one of hers survive, it is hard to gauge its exact nature. It is assumed that Poe saw this woman--of whom he knew nothing--as a potential second wife, but his extant letters are so stilted and artificial, it is hard to know for certain what he thought of her. There is no evidence of genuine warmth in his attitude, but he was always desperately receptive to sympathy wherever it could be found--sympathy he particularly needed after Virginia’s death--so it would not be unreasonable if in his loneliness he hoped that this stranger who was so open in her admiration for him might prove to be something more than a pen-pal.

For some months, however, the only tangible result of their epistolary acquaintance was another poem she addressed to Poe, “The True Poet,” which appeared in the June 1, 1848 “New York Morning Post.” She breathlessly described him as “the poet of her heart.”

There is some uncertainty about their first personal meeting. In the 1870s, both Sarah Helen Whitman and Annie Richmond told John H. Ingram that in the spring of 1848, Mrs. Locke visited Fordham in order to invite Poe to deliver a lecture at her residence of Lowell, Massachusetts. Presumably, he then learned that his admirer was not, as he may have imagined, well-to-do and unattached, but an impecunious, very married woman with numerous children. However, a contemporary--so presumably more reliable--letter written by Annie’s brother A.B. Heywood stated that when Poe came to Lowell in July, encountering the ineligible and undesirable Mrs. Locke for the first time was a disconcerting experience for the poet.

In any case, Poe’s Lowell lecture marked the beginning of the end of his nascent friendship with Mrs. Locke. While staying at her home, he met her friend and neighbor Mrs. Richmond, and, it was said, immediately transferred his affections to her. According to Sarah Helen Whitman, during this visit “the two ladies apparently vied with each other for Poe’s attention.” As a result, “A quarrel …had sprung up between the two ladies, and before he left, open hostility was declared.”

Jane Locke did not give Poe up without a fight. In her own inimitable fashion, she wooed him by sending a simply astonishing thirty-one stanza poem in his honor entitled “Ermina’s Tale.”  ("I felt as in the presence of a god!")

"Henceforth the raven's beak my heart shall bear,
And the strange flapping of its ebon wings
Fan my sad spirit to a deep despair,
Wild as the 'nevermore' it ceaseless sings."

The full text can be found here.  Lengthy as it is, it needs to be read in its whole to get the full flavor of “Ermina’s” singular personality.

Incidentally, I now know what killed Poe. It was the aftereffects of Mrs. Locke's poetry.

This effusion failing to win Poe’s heart, Mrs. Locke bewailed the end of love’s dream with the inevitable verses. “The Broken Charm” appeared in the “Boston Notion” in February 1849:

“Not that I thought to clasp thee as mine own. —
But I had robed thee with such holiness,
And round thy form a veil of glory thrown,
I can but weep before the false impress.”

After getting this off her chest, Mrs. Locke, like Mary Stuart after the murder of Rizzio, studied revenge. It was said she turned her efforts towards destroying both him and her “rival,” Mrs. Richmond. In the 1870s, Annie Richmond gave John Ingram a copy (the original is not extant) of a letter she claimed to have received from Poe early in 1849. In this letter, he railed against the “malignant misrepresentations” of Mrs. and Mr. Locke. According to this letter, Poe had quarreled with the Lockes over their insulting attitude towards the Richmonds. After this offense to their “insane vanity and self-esteem,” the Lockes retaliated by “ransacking the world for scandal” to use against him, with the result that Mr. Richmond (who is a curious cipher in this whole domestic melodrama) came to distrust Poe.

“Annie” informed Ingram that she showed this letter of Poe’s to her husband, who gallantly responded by sending the Lockes a letter “denouncing them in the strongest terms.”

According to the copies of Poe’s letters provided by “Annie,” this distressingly childish squabble went on for some time. Whatever the exact truth of the details--“Annie” was not as reliable a source as we would wish--it is indisputable that Poe and Mrs. Locke became estranged, although her attitude towards him remained unhealthily fanatical.

The whole episode, unedifying as it was, did not lack comic relief. According to yet another of Mrs. Richmond’s copies of her correspondence, in the spring of 1849 Poe wrote with undisguised horror that Mrs. Locke informed him that she was writing a roman a clef about their relationship. According to this letter, her tell-all novel--which, if it was anything like her poetry, would have been one for the ages--was about to be published. This is the first and last we hear of the book, however, making it impossible to know if:

A: Mrs. Locke had truly written such a manuscript, only to have saner heads in the publishing world pull the plug on her project.
B: She was only using the threat of publication as a way of getting a hold over Poe.
C: Poe or Mrs. Richmond simply invented the story.

Sarah Helen Whitman also provided testimony that Mrs. Locke’s stalkerish ways had not abated. Although her own relationship with Poe was over by 1849, she later said that in the spring of that year, Mrs. Locke sent her many invitations to visit Lowell. As the woman was a complete stranger, she declined. However, “Ermina” was so persistent in her demands for a visit that she finally gave in. Mrs. Whitman later wrote that although she liked both the Lockes very much (a statement that speaks eloquently about her judgment,) she began to suspect that “Her object in seeking my acquaintance was unquestionably to prevent any renewal of my correspondence with Mr. Poe, by whom she concieved [sic] herself to have been deeply wronged.” In another letter, Mrs. Whitman expressed her belief that Mrs. Locke hoped to “pique the Raven” by exhibiting her as a houseguest, “or perhaps bring about a reconciliation with him through my means.” (How Mrs. Whitman--herself bitterly estranged from Poe--could possibly “bring about a reconciliation” is something only she and her ether bottle could answer.)

She went on to say that after this visit to Lowell, Mrs. Locke continued to bombard her with letters expressing her continuing obsession with Poe. Mrs. Whitman observed that her unwanted correspondent “was too much under the influence of wounded pride to exercise a calm judgment in the matter.” This was evidently Sarah Helen’s typically milquetoast way of saying, “crazy with a side of fries.”

Poe’s demise did nothing to end Mrs. Locke’s unfortunate fixation on him. Her first act, of course, was to publish a "Requiem to Edgar A. Poe." ("Strike the anthem, bards and brothers/Softly sweep your many lyres/Let the low and solemn requiem/Linger on their silver wires!")

According to Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Locke followed this public expression of affectionate mourning by writing her a letter “to say that [Poe] had spoken disrespectfully of me to his friends in Lowell. In reply I made no allusion whatever to the paragraph in question. In her next letter she repeated the assertion. I passed it in silence as before. She then came to Providence and passed a night with me. On her attempting to introduce the subject which she had so often touched upon in her letters I interrupted her by saying that I did not wish to listen to any charges against one whose memory was dear and sacred to me,--that if false they could not now be refuted,--if true, I could understand and forgive them. . . I fear from her own confessions, that she has sometimes used my name very unwarrantably to endorse her own opinions of Mr. Poe's character. In a letter to Mr. Willis, written about the time of Edgar's death, she ventured to do so--citing me as authority for some impressions which she entertained with regard to his moral character. I wrote Miss Lynch at the time, requesting her to set Mr. Willis right on the matter, but as some coolness then existed between Miss Lynch and myself I am ignorant whether the request was ever complied with." Such shenanigans did not escape Maria Clemm's attention. Poe's "Muddy" wrote Thomas Holley Chivers that she had not seen Mrs. Locke since "Eddie's" death: "She spoke unkindly of him since then and that is sufficient to make me hate her."

"Ermina," in between episodes of Griswoldian trashing of the late poet's memory, also spread the word that Poe had left a fond “deathbed message” to her--conveyed via Mrs. Whitman!--a self-serving fabrication that left Mrs. Clemm sputtering in fury at her presumption: “Mrs. L[ocke] would have been the last woman in the world he would have written to…She will have to be more cautious how she speaks of him or I will have to speak as she will not wish.”

In the doughty Mrs. Clemm, we may have finally found the person capable of getting Jane Ermina Starkweather Locke to just shut up. The turbulent Mrs. L. made a quiet retreat until her death in 1859.

(Image via eapoe.org.)

The Name of Annabel Lee (Part Two)

4. Frances Sargent Locke Osgood

In Osgood's case, it has not been suggested that she herself was the inspiration for "Annabel Lee," but that one of her poems was. In 1983, in the journal "Studies in the American Renaissance," Buford Jones and Kent Ljungquist published a strange little article, "Poe, Mrs. Osgood, and 'Annabel Lee,'" where they made the argument that Osgood's "The Life-Voyage" was a source for Poe's work.

This remarkably silly thesis was quickly demolished in a rebuttal by John E. Reilly ("Mrs. Osgood's 'The Life-Voyage' and 'Annabel Lee,'" "Poe Studies," June 1984.) Despite this, it still has a few adherents among Osgood's modern-day champions, who fondly cherish a revisionist fantasy of her as an unappreciated feminist genius. However, all one has to do is read "The Life-Voyage"--something, incidentally, I do not really recommend doing, as it is a lengthy and quite tedious experience--to realize that it is as unlike "Annabel Lee" as anything calling itself a poem could possibly get.

5. Sarah Anna ("Stella") Lewis

After Poe's death, Mrs. Lewis was reputed to have said that she was the poem's inspiration, with one version of the rumor claiming that she had heard this directly from Mrs. Clemm. It is not clear whether we have anything first-hand from Mrs. Lewis herself about the matter, but in any case, the idea of a connection between "Stella" and "Annabel Lee" is something not even Poe scholars have been able to take seriously. It is highly questionable that even Mrs. Lewis did.

6. Nancy Locke Heywood ("Annie") Richmond

The similarity of Mrs. Richmond's adopted first name to that of Poe's heroine has led some of the more fanciful biographers to speculate on a possible connection. However, "Annie" herself found no personal significance in the poem. In fact, she wrote John H. Ingram that Mrs. Clemm always maintained that "Annabel Lee," a poem which Mrs. Richmond claimed not to "understand," was written for Virginia. She added rather puzzlingly, "I think myself, that it has very little significance, if it was intended for anyone else, but his bride."7. Nobody

Chief spokesperson for this theory was Susan Archer Talley Weiss, who claimed that during the summer of 1849, Poe made a point of telling her that "Annabel Lee" (which was, of course, unpublished at the time,) had no connection to his late wife, or any other woman.

8. Everybody

Kenneth Silverman opted to cover all the bases by suggesting the poem "represents all of the women he loved and lost."

9. Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe

A couple of the nuttier disciples of Freud have made hazy speculations that Poe had his long-lost mother in mind when he wrote the poem. Which brings us into pop-psychological waters I refuse to even wade into.

10. Maria Scott

That ever-industrious fabulist Susan Weiss at times blithely ignored the story she gave in #7 above, instead stating that "Annabel Lee" was this Miss Scott, an early love of Poe's who entered a convent and died young. (Weiss also wrote that at the age of ten, Poe wrote "To Helen" for this same girl.) Needless to say, there is no other evidence whatsoever that "Maria Scott" ever existed.

11. Mary J. Leland

I discussed this particular historical atrocity here.

12. Annabel Lee Ravenel

This is among the plethora of Poe legends that has absolutely no basis in reality, but refuses to die a decent death. In Charleston, South Carolina, there is a local legend (started, I suspect, by tour guides who had a few too many,) that when Poe was stationed there during his army career, he had the obligatory ill-fated love affair with a local belle, which, years after her untimely death, inspired his famous verses. Although the Ravenels were a genuine Charleston-area family, there is no evidence Poe knew any of them, and, as with the case of Mrs. Weiss' Maria Scott, there is no reason at all to believe anyone named "Annabel Lee Ravenel" ever so much as walked the face of the earth. But why let a little detail like that keep a good story down?

13. Jane Stith Stanard

Mrs. Stanard reputedly acted as friend and mentor to Poe during his boyhood, and her tragic descent into insanity and death when he was fifteen was believed to have been a serious blow to him. She was supposedly the inspiration for his first "To Helen" poem--which would be curious, as the lines are so obviously describing Helen of Troy, and have no discernable connection to the ill-fated Richmond matron. One or two literary critics have suggested that Mrs. Stanard was also the model for "Annabel Lee," (and, like most of the other women on this list, "Lenore,") but any possible link is far too tenuous for serious consideration.

So, there you have it; a veritable Army of Annabels. I am not aware of any stories arguing that the poem was inspired by Maria Clemm, Elizabeth Ellet, his landlady at 85 Amity Street, or Catterina, but if there are such claims, please do not tell me about them.

(Images courtesy New York Public Library, Wikipedia.)

Marginalia

In his recent book, "Poe in His Own Time," Benjamin F. Fisher made reference to Elizabeth Oakes Smith's copious writings about Poe by commenting that Smith "knew well the American literary milieu of Poe's own day, even if she hadn't known Poe himself." Strangely, Fisher either overlooked or deliberately disregarded the significance of his own observation. If Fisher is correct that Smith never actually knew Poe at all, then everything she wrote about him--most particularly her detailed, and highly implausible, accounts of her meetings and conversations with the poet, which his biographers have extensively used for source material--were massive and flagrant fictions.

Evidence that Fisher's statement was accurate comes from Smith's close friend Sarah Helen Whitman. When writing to John H. Ingram in the 1870s, Whitman expressed her contempt for a recent article Smith had published about Poe. In particular, she pointed to Smith's description of an intimate talk she claimed to have had with Poe about his relationship with Mrs. Whitman. Whitman, who described Smith as "constitutionally inaccurate," stated flatly that she was certain no such conversation had ever taken place. How could Whitman know Poe had never expressed the sentiments in question unless she was aware that Smith had never had any conversations with Poe at all?

Whitman made an even more intriguing remark on the subject. She wrote Ingram a strangely cryptic reference to Smith's Poe reminiscences. She stated they "did not spring so much from genuine friendliness & regard as from other motives which are betrayed in some of the--but I will not carp or criticize."

Maddeningly, Whitman never explained what these "other motives" may have been. I'd certainly like to know.

*****

One of the innumerable overlooked little oddities in Poe's history is that Maria Clemm's handwriting bore a distinct resemblance to her nephew's. In fact, it was said that she could copy his manuscripts so exactly that no one could guess it was not his writing. (A copy, presumed to have been made by Mrs. Clemm, of a letter Poe sent her on September 18, 1849 has sometimes been mistaken for an actual Poe MS. Incidentally, for whatever mysterious reason, we have only a fragment of the original letter.) Richard Henry Stoddard even quoted her as saying to him that after Poe's death, she received so many requests for his autograph that she would simply forge samples of his writing and send them on to his admirers.

All of this puts a curious question mark over many of our extant "Poe" letters and manuscripts.

*****

The only full transcript we have of the last letter Poe sent to Sarah Helen Whitman comes to us from Annie Richmond, of all people. (Whitman herself, in her typically strange fashion, preserved only an meaningless eight-line fragment of the original letter. She always aimed to shape the historical record by carefully copying, destroying, and mutilating her Poe-related correspondence in an effort to display the story she wanted told.) Mrs. Richmond told John Ingram that before Poe sent Mrs. Whitman this letter discussing the end of their relationship and the ugly gossip surrounding that event, he sent it to her so that she could read it over and then forward it (anonymously, I presume) to Whitman in Providence. Mrs. Richmond claimed to have made a copy of this letter, which she sent to Ingram.

Now, can I possibly be the only one who finds her story to be exceedingly suspicious? First of all, I find it odd that Poe would send Mrs. Richmond the actual letter to forward to the other woman. Aside from the unseemliness in sharing his private relations with Mrs. Whitman with a third party, if he wished to defend his actions in the Whitman episode to Annie (she told Ingram that the stories she had heard about his disgraceful behavior in Providence led her to contemplate ending her friendship with Poe--which says a lot about her "devotion" to him,) it would have been sufficient for Poe to tell her "I wrote Mrs. Whitman this-and-this..." Secondly, why in the world would Mrs. Richmond have bothered to write out and keep a copy of this letter--particularly since the contents were certainly none of her business? Surely, in January of 1849 she could have had no idea that, nearly thirty years later, her transcript of this letter might be useful biographical source material.

The final oddity about this story is that Mrs. Whitman--a fragile and cowardly woman who shrank from even the mildest confrontation--never worked up the nerve to even answer this letter. (Which confirms my suspicion that she was hardly blameless in whatever went on between her and Poe.) Mrs. Richmond, however, told Ingram that Whitman had responded, with a letter exonerating Poe's behavior. What makes Annie's statement even more peculiar is the fact that among the copies of Poe's letters to her that she gave Ingram is one where he commented on Whitman's failure to answer his letter!

Annie Richmond, like so many other figures in Poe's history, made a very unsatisfactory witness. Nearly everything she ever said about him inevitably took on an air of shenanigans.

In Defense of Maria Clemm (Part Three)

4. Mrs. Clemm's fourth and final affront against the sensibilities of the biographers is the fact that she allowed Rufus W. Griswold to serve as Poe's literary executor. We will never know how Griswold got that fatal task--as so often happens in Poe's history, everyone involved offered completely different and utterly incompatible explanations, leaving the truth hopelessly buried. The Lewises, however--"Stella" was already angling for Griswold to become her next literary patron--clearly played a central, and quite sinister, role in it all. (Mr. Lewis acted as Mrs. Clemm's legal advisor, and Mrs. Lewis proudly took "credit" for enlisting Griswold on the dead poet's behalf.) Mrs. Clemm stated afterwards that Poe had not intended that Griswold be his executor, but she never made it clear what, if any, plans he had made in that respect.

What often gets overlooked is that Griswold's appointment as executor was disastrous only in retrospect. At the time of Poe's death, he and Griswold had been on outwardly amicable terms for some time. Griswold, in his usual oily fashion, had managed to bamboozle Mrs. Clemm (and other people as well) into thinking he was not unfriendly towards her son. And Griswold may have been a shameless and mediocre literary hack, but he was a highly successful and influential one. All in all, he must have seemed to Mrs. Clemm as good a choice to handle Poe's literary estate as anyone.

While the poor woman must gone on to blame herself every day of her life for allowing Griswold anywhere near Poe's legacy, the fact that she did so is completely understandable.

There have been several minor accusations made against Maria Clemm, as well--largely from Annie Richmond and Marie Louise Houghton. These personal resentments were vague and often illogical. We have a letter "Annie" wrote in the early 1850s to Mrs. Houghton--who appears from this document to have been a close personal friend, although oddly neither woman, in their dealings with Poe biographer John H. Ingram, gave any other mention of their relationship. In this letter, "Annie" complains cryptically of Mrs. Clemm having betrayed some sort of secrets or confidences of hers. What these could have been is anybody's guess.

Mrs. Richmond also told Ingram that certain of Poe's letters to her had disappeared, and accused Mrs. Clemm of having stolen them. (When Ingram's bitter biographical rival William Gill published quotes from one of her Poe letters, "Annie" sensed that Ingram resented her collaboration with his enemy. She shiftily excused herself to him by stating that Gill also must have obtained those letters through thievery.) She never made it clear why Poe's aunt would have done such a thing, and her credibility is not enhanced by the fact that, during Mrs. Clemm's lifetime, she wrote to her wailing that a daguerreotype of Poe she owned had disappeared. She declared that someone must have stolen it, and (rather tactlessly) begged Mrs. Clemm to see to it that she (Mrs. Richmond) got Mrs. Clemm's own Poe daguerreotype after she (Mrs. C.) died. As we know Mrs. Richmond had this "stolen" daguerreotype in her possession some years later, her story smacks of either extreme carelessness or suspicious craftiness. At any rate, for all her fondness for back-stabbing Mrs. Clemm, Mrs. Richmond fooled her into thinking she was her warm friend to the end. ("Annie" had hoped to obtain Mrs. Clemm's papers after she died, and grumbled to Ingram about how her husband's illness at the time Poe's aunt passed on prevented her from marching to Baltimore and insisting upon her "claim" to them.)

As for Mrs. Houghton, her bitterness appears to have stemmed from resentment that Mrs. Clemm had not expressed sufficient "gratitude" for all her alleged services to the Poe family. Mrs. Houghton--from what little can be deciphered from her rambling, hysterical and incredibly incoherent letters to Ingram--was indignant that the world was unaware what a Godsend she had been to the Poes, as (she obviously believed) Mrs. Clemm should have told one and all of how much Poe "owed" to her. (At the time Mrs. Houghton was writing to Ingram, she and Mrs. Lewis were locked in a fierce, and most unseemly competition. Each lady was desperate to convince Poe's biographer that she herself--and not the other woman--had been Poe's chief "benefactress.") Mrs. Houghton also made some disparaging remarks about Mrs. Clemm's "worldly wisdom." Rather perversely, she went on to imply that Poe's aunt was to blame for their indigence because she had too much pride to admit to anyone the family was in need of charity, which hardly seems to indicate "worldliness."

Sarah Helen Whitman once said that Frances S. Osgood had told her that Mrs. Clemm was nothing but a thorn in Poe's side, and was always getting him into difficulties. Whether Osgood actually said such a thing is unknown, but if she did it shows that her claims of being so friendly with the Poe family were self-serving lies. Whitman herself made it clear she was dubious about the truth of this remark. She stated that to her, Poe had always spoken of his aunt with the greatest love and gratitude for the devoted care she had given him and Virginia. Indeed, everyone else who knew Poe unanimously agreed this was his attitude--an attitude they also agreed was entirely justified, as the poor man would not have lasted five minutes in the world without her mothering. In spite of all the poverty and discord of Poe's life, Mrs. Clemm always managed somehow to provide him with a stable, affectionate, comforting home life that was his one refuge from the world. Without her and Virginia, Poe would undoubtedly have met a far earlier, and even worse end than he did.

All in all, Mrs. Clemm's accusers wind up looking far worse than their target.

As I said at the beginning of this essay, Mrs. Clemm had her flaws. In her long battles with the world, she could be insincere, manipulative, even exploitative towards anyone who could provide aid and comfort to her family. In the long "lonesome latter years" after Poe's death, she usually comes off as self-pitying and lugubrious--although God knows she had justification. However, I know of no instance where she was proven to be deliberately harmful or hurtful to anyone--no matter how they may have deserved it. While Edgar and Virginia lived, Mrs. Clemm was invariably described as a cheerful, dignified, remarkably capable, very motherly woman whose devotion to her "children" was completely unselfish and virtually limitless. Everything she did, however questionable, was done for her loved ones, and given the odds against her, she managed to do an impressive amount. The woman was a survivor if ever there was one. As Edward Wagenknecht said, "she was as immovable as the hills and as tireless as the sea; no human being was ever more faithful to those who put their trust in her."

It's rather a pity that when the Civil War broke out, neither side thought to make her a General. If they had, whichever army she served would have won the conflict within a week.

(Image: NYPL Digital Gallery)

Poe and A.B. Heywood

The most detailed descriptions we have of Poe's three visits to Lowell, Massachusetts in 1848 and 1849 come from a handful of contemporary letters written by "Annie" Richmond's brother, Amos Bardwell Heywood. These letters, which were written to an Annie Sawyer, first saw the light of day in 1942, when a daughter of Sawyer's donated them to the Lowell Historical Society. (So far as I know, no one has even made an effort to verify the letters were genuinely written by Heywood, but Poe scholars, in their usual touchingly trustful fashion, accept them without question.)

Assuming these letters--the only recorded comments by Heywood about Poe that we have--are authentic, they indeed provide an interesting sidelight on Poe's Lowell trips and his relationship with Mrs. Richmond--although not quite in the way one might think. Our other main source about Poe's relations with Lowell and the Richmond/Heywood family come, of course, from the letters Poe allegedly wrote "Annie." With the exception of a couple of items of unknown provenance and dubious authenticity, these letters exist only as copies that Mrs. Richmond herself made for John H. Ingram in the 1870s. (It should be noted that the two letters Poe supposedly wrote "Annie's" sister Sarah are also mere copies.) We will never know what was in the actual letters "Annie" may have received from Poe, because she never showed them to Ingram or anyone else. This air of secrecy about her documents, (so oddly reminiscent of the tactics of Sarah Helen Whitman,) must cast doubt upon the trustworthiness of Richmond's testimony. The "Poe letters" "Annie" wrote out for Ingram describe the poet as being nearly as infatuated with her relatives as he was with herself. Sarah and Bardwell Heywood are repeatedly referred to--in the most nauseatingly groveling way possible--as among the dearest, most treasured friends he had.

In contrast, the Heywood letters are very similar to the reminiscences written by his other sister, Sarah Heywood (which I briefly described here.) "Annie's" siblings described Poe as a figure who aroused considerable fascination and intellectual admiration in them both. However, they also saw him as a remote, rather mysterious figure whom they scarcely knew, even as an acquaintance--precisely the way you would expect them to describe a literary celebrity who made only three very brief visits to their town. Certainly, neither sibling showed any awareness that Poe was wildly, hopelessly in love with their sister. In other words, their attitude towards Poe directly contradicts the evidence provided by the "Annie" letters.

Heywood's first reference to Poe (one brief comment in a letter from August 1848,) actually deals with Poe's relations with another woman entirely--Heywood's neighbor Jane Locke. In another letter written two months later, he offered some clarification of his earlier remark. According to this letter, Mrs. Locke confided to Heywood that Poe--who had corresponded with her for some months--had gotten the impression that she was a wealthy widow. Heywood hinted that the poet had been considering marriage--until he finally met her in person, during his first visit to Lowell that July, and discovered that she was an unattractive middle-aged woman with little money, plus a husband and several children. Why Mrs. Locke would choose to make Heywood her confidante in this extremely personal contretemps is a mystery. It is also unclear how this story squares with "Annie's" claim to Ingram that Mrs. Locke visited Poe at Fordham before his arrival at Lowell.

In this same letter, Heywood discussed the lecture Poe delivered during his visit, as well as two calls he made at Mrs. Richmond's home. He described Poe as treating the household to the story of his life. Heywood wrote:

"He was the offspring of a runaway match, and when very young was taken and adopted by a very rich uncle who, having no children, wished to make Edgar his son. He (Edgar) accordingly assumed his uncle's name--Poe. Soon, however, his adopted mother died, and his father married a young lady who saw in Edgar her only impediment to her being the sole heir to an immense fortune. She began to quarrel with him and finally succeeded in driving him away. In his father's will, who died soon after, he was cut off with a shilling. He now went to live with an aunt who had a beautiful daughter named Virginia. A great intimacy sprang up between them and they came to look upon each other as brother and sister. Notice that was the kind of affection--a brotherly and sisterly affection, and nothing more or less. Numerous friends, however, thought a marriage between them would for several reasons be desirable. At last he yielded to the solicitations of friends and married her at the early age of 13, he being 21 or 22. Although he loved her with an undivided heart he could not think of her as his wife, or as any other than his sister, and indeed he did not for two years assume the position of husband, still occupying his own chamber by himself. During part of this time he was traveling alone in Europe. His wife was spared to him several years, but at length consumption fastened upon the lovely flower and it gradually faded away. Since that almost overwhelming affliction he has continued to live with her mother in New York. He spoke of his wife in a most eloquent and touching manner, the tears running down his cheeks in torrents. Spoke of her as beautiful beyond description, as lovely beyond conception..."

If this letter gave an accurate account of Poe's soliloquy, it is clear the visiting poet was up to his usual hoaxing. Anyone familiar with Poe's singular notions of autobiography will recognize the similarities to his yarns about battling for Greek independence, undergoing imprisonment in St. Petersburg, Russia, and being the grandson of Benedict Arnold. Many of his biographers have taken seriously these claims that he and Virginia saw each other merely as "brother and sister," ignoring the fact that his own August 1835 letter to her and Mrs. Clemm alone demolishes this scenario. In any case--assuming Poe truly entertained himself by spouting this nonsense to his new-found acquaintances--if one trusts that information, one must also accept that he was raised by his "uncle," who gave him the name, "Poe," that "numerous friends," for who knows what reason, earnestly solicited him to marry Virginia, that he married at age 21 or 22, that his parents eloped, that he had been "driven" away from his boyhood home by the new Mrs. Allan, and that he spent part of his early married life traveling alone through Europe. And that he chose to relay all these intimate details to people he had just met. (Here, one must sympathize with William Bittner's perplexed observation that "I cannot see Poe discussing the secrets of his marriage bed with anyone.")

Personally, I have an easier time picturing him fighting for the Greeks.

Heywood also added the detail that "my sister"--Mrs. Richmond, presumably, although that is not specified--had recently visited Maria Clemm at Fordham. He gave no details about this call, other than that his sister was told that Virginia had been "almost an angel on earth." (Heywood does not state if Poe was at his home during this visit, so we do not know if he, or Maria Clemm, or both, thus described Poe's late wife.) Assuming this story is true--Mrs. Richmond herself never said anything about ever being at Fordham--it is of some interest. At least one of Poe's biographers has noted that this anecdote gives the impression that during this visit, an effort was made to throw some cold water upon Mrs. Richmond's obvious interest in Poe.

Elsewhere in this same letter, Heywood--a member of the local choir--recorded how offended he had been when Poe asserted to him that men had no business singing. Only the female sex, the visitor declared, could create true vocal harmony. (Heywood groused, "I had a strong inclination to throw the glass in his face!")

In fact, throughout Heywood's letters is the sense not only that he did not know Poe well at all, but that what he saw rather irritated him. In a later letter, he commented on his dislike of Poe's critical reviews. "I came near hating him before I saw him, he is such an inveterate fault finder...It seems to be the predominating trait of his character." Even while acknowledging the beauties of the local scenery, Heywood grumbled, Poe could not resist pointing out what he perceived as flaws in the landscape.When describing Poe's last visit to Lowell, in the spring of 1849, Heywood told an anecdote concerning Poe and a young woman who taught at the local school where Heywood was the principal. He told Miss Sawyer that Poe had paid a brief visit to the school while he was in town, and instantly fell in love with this female assistant. (Her name is not given, but she is believed to be an Eliza J. Butterfield.) According to this letter, Poe made a second call on the school specifically to see the woman, so Heywood left them in a room alone, speculating that the poet wished to propose marriage. (To a virtual stranger?) He did not know what happened between the lady and their odd visitor, only that her cheek had "an uncommon flush" when they emerged, implying that whatever had happened deeply disconcerted her. Heywood made no further mention of Poe and his new-found inamorata, leaving a decided air of mystery about the episode.

Now, even by the standards of Poe biography, this is one strange little story. Although many biographers suggest Poe may have become emotionally troubled in his final months, by all accounts he remained politely troubled. To the very end, every woman who had dealings with him commented on the extreme graciousness and civility of his manner towards them. In other words, whatever else he may have been, he was just never a man to make women blush--particularly respectable young ladies he had met only once. Heywood's tale of throwing Poe and this hapless young teacher together, so that the visiting poet could force some sort of highly embarrassing--and clearly, on the lady's part, undesired--attentions to her, simply is not credible. (It is also odd that, if this incident actually happened, we have nothing about it from the young woman herself. If someone as famous as Edgar Allan Poe had truly made a pass at her, surely she would have told everyone she met about it until the end of her days.) Assuming the letter is genuine, Heywood allowed his obvious desire to impress his correspondent to get the better of him. In any case, this unpleasant little tale of antebellum sexual harassment demonstrated that he had no conception that Poe was supposedly infatuated with Heywood's own sister! ***

Heywood had little else to say about Poe. In two letters written soon after the poet's death, he expressed surprise at their visitor's premature end, but said nothing to indicate he--or his sisters--felt any sense of personal loss. He mentioned that Mrs. Clemm was currently visiting them, and that "From her we have gathered much in relation to his domestic nature which is quite interesting and often amusing."

("Amusing?!?")

Heywood's way of eulogizing Poe was by offering a prediction that his fame as a writer would not endure: "...he has written nothing that will embalm his memory in the heart of the present age.

***A footnote: We have a letter that Poe purportedly wrote Mrs. Richmond, dated June 16, 1849, which indicated that, when departing from Lowell for the last time, he asked to be remembered to a "Miss B," who is presumed to be Eliza Butterfield, A.B. Heywood's co-worker. This document has a strange history. Ingram published this same letter, but lacking the reference to "Miss B." We do not have the transcript of this letter which he must have received from Mrs. Richmond, so we do not know exactly what text she sent him of this particular communication. What is believed to be the original manuscript of this letter, which has other passages not published by Ingram, is currently in the University of Texas at Austin. The MS. only came to light in 1906, when it went up for sale at auction. Its prior history is uncertain.

The letter's murky provenance is itself suspicious, (especially as it's assumed that Mrs. Richmond destroyed all of Poe's letters to her sometime before her death in 1898,) but the text itself is problematic. One of the passages which does not appear in the published version of the letter has Poe telling Mrs. Richmond of "how sad I felt about parting with dear Sarah so coldly as I was forced to do..."

The comment refers to Poe's spring 1849 visit to Lowell, made shortly before the date of this letter. One of the difficulties in accepting this line as one genuinely written by Poe arises from Sarah Heywood herself. The Poe reminiscences she provided to Ingram and William Gill in the 1870s stated that the last time she saw Poe was during his Lowell stay in the fall of 1848. If so, in the following spring she obviously could not have parted from him "coldly," or in any other fashion.

There is another version of Sarah Heywood's Poe recollections, also at Austin. It is a typed transcript, undated but evidently written around 1900. This account, which differs in many details from her earlier story, is vague about the last time she saw Poe, describing it merely as "a few months before his death," which could refer to his spring 1849 visit. (Of course, as I said in an earlier post, by 1909 she was describing seeing the poet a few days before he died.)

Sarah Heywood's memories of Poe obviously became very confused over the years (which is not surprising, as all her recollections indicate she scarcely saw anything of the man--when she died in 1913, her obituary described her as having met Poe once.) It is logical, however, to treat her earliest account--the one published by Gill and Ingram--as the most reliable. If so, that undermines the authenticity of the manuscript of the "Miss B" letter.

More and more, I find myself thinking that the ideal biographer for Poe would have been Charles Fort.

I'm actually at least half-serious about that. Anyone deeply interested in Poe should read Fort's works--"The Book of the Damned" in particular. Fort's cosmology is similar to Poe's in certain ways--there are passages in his books that almost echo "Eureka." Also, his descriptions of how scientists have constructed an artificial "reality," with any "data" that conflicts with this "reality" being either ignored or distorted--that is to say, "damned"--is strikingly reminiscent of how Poe "scholarship" has been built. Anyone studying Poe's true history in depth comes across "damned data" at nearly every turn.

And for all of you who have finally come to the end of this post and understandably concluded that I have, at long last, gone well and truly off the deep end by starting off with analyzing the letters of an obscure Massachusetts schoolteacher and winding up with Charles Fort, I can only offer a quote from "Lo!":

"We shall pick up an existence by its frogs.

Wise men have tried other ways. They have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."


(Images of 1840s-era Lowell courtesy Lowell Historical Society.)

Marginalia

In analyzing the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and "Annie" Richmond, one little-known, but interesting fact stands out: Among her circle, she was known to be what we now would call a "literary groupie." Prominent writers were the pop stars of that era, and Mrs. Richmond revelled in the reflected intellectual glamour she felt she gained from their company. One gets the suspicion that if she had never met Poe, she would have been equally happy to become close to anyone of equal renown.

As a matter of fact, there is an extremely strange message Mrs. Richmond wrote Mrs. Clemm in 1854. (Now in Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library.) It is one long, rambling, incoherent love letter about Nathaniel P. Willis, one of the most commercially popular American writers of his time. "Annie" did not know Willis, but she was aware that Mrs. Clemm did, and she was clearly angling for Poe's aunt to arrange an introduction. (It is an amusing irony that several people who knew both Poe and Willis--including Charles F. Briggs, Marie Shew Houghton, and James Russell Lowell--asserted that Poe thought little of Willis' writings and despised him personally.)

In her usual breathless, hyper-emotional style, Mrs. Richmond wailed, "how I do pity Mr. Willis, & I am sure, I love him more than ever--oh how I wish I were his sister, & I would love him so dearly..." She goes on to call Willis "one of my idols, for you know Muddie, I always told you, that I longed to see Mr. Willis more than any other human being...he who has ever touched the most sacred & the deepest recesses in my heart...I do, pray for him, & to pray Heaven to send him comfort, & to surround him with gentle and loving spirits, such as he knows so well, how to appreciate & enjoy...Why I almost worship him, his name is connected, with my earliest & sweetest remembrances, & I learned to love him, as soon as I learned to read..."

Nowadays, letters like this about celebrities usually get the writer slapped with a restraining order.

******

For years prior to her death in 1878, Sarah Helen Whitman sent extracts from the letters she claimed to have received from Poe to many of her correspondents. Mrs. Whitman believed--with complete sincerity, so far as anyone could tell--that these rather horrifying letters illustrated not only the nobility of Poe's nature, but his profound bond with herself. (It is a completely un-amusing irony that these letters--as well as the similar missives provided by Annie Richmond--have instead usually been used as proof that Poe was going mad in his last years.)

The recipients of these extracts were generally either too polite or too sycophantic to contradict her. There was, however, at least one exception. In 1872, she sent the poet Richard Henry Stoddard, who had written what she felt was an unsatisfactory magazine article about Poe, copies of some of her precious letters. Whitman claimed the letters would cause Stoddard to see Poe in a more sympathetic light.She made a grave miscalculation. Whitman passed on to Stoddard the notorious letter that depicted Poe, as part of his wooing, declaring to her that when he married Virginia, he knew he was sacrificing his own happiness. After reading this letter, Stoddard told her frankly that he found the implied assertion that Poe had not loved his wife very disturbing, and he hoped the dead poet had not been truthful. Stoddard had had no real acquaintance with Poe, but he knew many people who had, and he stated in print that all of them, including Poe's enemies, testified that whatever his faults may have been, Poe's obvious love for Virginia was a true "bright spot in his character." Stoddard made it quite clear that he believed this letter simply lied about Poe's marriage.

Whitman's reaction to this negative feedback was interesting. She went completely to pieces. Among her papers in the University of Indiana's Lilly Library is an unfinished rough draft of her response to Stoddard. Its sheer incoherence is testimony to her inability to handle any challenge to her carefully crafted illusions.

"I am sorry," she wrote, "that you condemn him for what he said to me of his marriage. He did not say that he did not love her but that he married exclusively for her happiness. Assuredly he loved & very dearly her but doubtlessly he [the following section in bold was crossed out] was as a sister & a child rather doubtless felt that she could not enrich his life with felt there could be little reciprocity of thought or life between them. Again, it was not in his first letter that he said this but it was in defending himself against some implied charge a passage contained in my letter which had deeply pained & wounded him & for which he [word illegible] & he had no sooner said it than condemned himself for the admission."

What comes out most clearly from this letter--aside from her obvious agitation--is that Whitman really did not know what Poe's true relationship with his wife had been. Or perhaps she did not want to know. As was so often the case when discussing Poe, she retreated into contradiction and unfounded theorizing. One has to wonder if she ever really knew the first thing about him.

Whatever she eventually actually sent Stoddard in defense of these letters had little effect. After her death, Stoddard published an article where he expressed his disgust with the "Poe letters" he had read. He reiterated that the letters were remarkably insincere, dishonest, and strained, and it astounded him that Mrs. Whitman appeared to put a near-religious faith in them.

For her part, Mrs. Whitman never forgave Stoddard's disparaging remarks. Several years later, she sent copies of these same letters to John Henry Ingram (it appears, however, that Stoddard's reaction taught her to omit the passage referring to Poe's marriage.) She told Ingram haughtily that she was sure he would appreciate them, unlike Stoddard, who, she seethed, had dismissed them as "very curious, very curious, indeed." Her correspondence with Ingram is peppered throughout with complaints against Stoddard, all clearly stemming from her continual resentment over his failure to duly applaud her relationship with Poe. (Ingram, for his part, avoided directly commenting on these "Poe letters." In his biography of Poe, he could only gingerly--or rather, queasily--describe these epistles as "idiosyncratic." Worse still, from Whitman's point of view, Ingram wound up asserting--in print--his conviction that Poe had never really loved "Helen.")

**A footnote: Kenneth Silverman's "Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance"--a book I always pick up whenever I need a good laugh--published portions of this draft letter of Whitman's quoted above. However, in his usual muddled fashion, Silverman rather vaguely depicted these lines as Mrs. Whitman directly quoting remarks Poe supposedly made to her. In other words, Silverman led his readers to assume that Whitman's baseless speculations about Poe's feelings for Virginia were actually statements from Poe's own mouth. This is a fine example of why the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore commented that Silverman's book "...has been much derided in academic Poe circles..." and that it "suffers badly from a deep bias against Poe, a silly preoccupation with discredited psycho-analytical approaches, a convenient oversimplification of the subject matter and an inadequate identification in the text of its rather selective sources. Read it if you must, but take what it offers with large doses of skepticism."

Amen to that.

Poe's Weirdest Woman, Sarah Helen Whitman; Or, The Biter Bit

"Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth."
-John Mason Brown

Sarah Helen Whitman lived for thirty years after her disagreeable and still-mysterious parting of the ways with Edgar Allan Poe. Over the long course of these years, his memory took on ever-greater importance in her life. Her growing interest in his life and work both fostered and fed upon Poe's increasingly legendary reputation. She developed a widening correspondence with Poe biographers and associates, and drew to herself many young Poe cultists, deftly utilizing her three-month acquaintance with the poet and her unique status as his reputed sort-of fiancee to transform herself into "Poe's Helen." This aging, plain, rather affected, modestly-talented poetess, spiritualist, Transcendentalist, and habitual drug user--a woman, in short, who appeared to be a completely incompatible match for Poe--became, to many of his acolytes, the ultimate Girl Who Got Away, a goddess of sorts. It is hard to believe Poe sincerely wished to marry a woman fatuous enough to solemnly have herself photographed dressed as Pallas Athena, but thanks to her, most observers did believe just that. She convinced a great many people who really should have known better that she--and only she--was the one great love of Poe's life. (Although Whitman's campaign to convince the world that "Annabel Lee" was a paean to her was a utter failure.)Like all the women who associated their names with Poe's, there was a predominant element of self-glorification in her desire to perpetuate the name and fame of "The Raven." One cannot but think the dead Poe meant much more to her than the live one ever did. A telling example of her narcissistic attitude came when she proudly allowed Richard Henry Stoddard to read the notorious letter she claimed to have received from Poe, which featured the poet mendaciously assuring Whitman, as a sign of his unique love for her, and of his sense of "honor," that by marrying Virginia, he had sacrificed his own happiness. Whitman was surprised and deeply upset when Stoddard expressed his dismay at the letter's depiction of Poe's callous disloyalty to the memory of a loving wife, rather than applauding the tribute to herself.

Of course, Sarah Whitman had a particular incentive to shape public perception about her "romance" with Poe--the widespread belief that he had jilted her, or worse, never really wanted to marry her at all. Rufus Griswold was the first to put into print the claim that when Poe went to Providence for the last time, he was determined to break his relationship with Whitman, even declaring to a New York poetess, Mary Hewitt, that the marriage would never take place. Griswold's lurid details about Poe deliberately staging a drunken tantrum at Whitman's house, all in order to compel her to break their engagement, were, of course, false, but after communicating with Hewitt herself, Whitman was forced to privately concede that Poe had denied they would marry. As late as 1877, she was irritated by a magazine columnist's assertion that Poe "disclaimed any personal interest in the projected marriage, in the presence of literary acquaintances here, even at the moment of receiving congratulations upon the sudden betterment of his prospects, and that his passionate letters to Mrs. Whitman were either wanting in sincerity, or he was weak enough to pretend an indifference that he did not feel." Whitman was understandably troubled and embarrassed to have such details become common knowledge, not because she had cared so deeply for Poe--in private letters, she asserted she never really loved him--but because of the blow to her pride. Any woman would surely find such talk painful--especially if she was aware there was truth to it--and Whitman was particularly vulnerable, being an emotionally fragile, hyper-sensitive and extremely vain personality. For her own psychological well-being, she had to do what she could to counter this perception of their relationship.

Nemesis finally came for Mrs. Whitman in the form of a Lowell, Massachusetts housewife, Annie Richmond. Whitman had never met her, but she knew of Mrs. Richmond as an acquaintance and admirer of Poe's, who was also corresponding with his biographer John H. Ingram. Ingram even told Whitman that "Annie" was providing him with interesting Poe letters.

Whitman had no idea just how interesting these letters were until Ingram published some of them as part of an 1878 "Appleton's Journal" article, "Unpublished Correspondence by Edgar A. Poe." This article revealed to her--and the world--the previously undreamed-of claim that, during Whitman's entire association with Poe--an association that had by then become central to her entire identity--he had been sending a married woman letters that made it painfully clear that she was his favored object of adoration, and the widowed, available "Poe's Helen" was a mere unsatisfactory consolation prize. If Mrs. Whitman had seen nothing wrong with informing the world that Poe had emotionally betrayed his dead wife to her, Mrs. Richmond was equally comfortable with asserting that Poe had betrayed both Virginia and Mrs. Whitman to her.

O. Henry could not have written a more stunning surprise ending to Mrs. Whitman's story. Her shock and humiliation must have been severe--the seventy-five year-old died about two months after the article's publication, and no wonder! What did the poor woman now have to live for?--but she publicly reacted with a commendable dignity.

Soon after Ingram's article appeared in print, she published a wry, telling commentary on the piece in a local paper, the "Providence Journal." She began by observing that "some of Poe's later memorialists may perhaps be blamed for not burning material confided to them for publication by Poe's nearest and dearest friends."

About the "material" itself, Whitman noted "the absence of all testimony as to the verbal authenticity of the letters." Referring in particular to a long, surreal letter Poe supposedly wrote Marie Shew Houghton, she pointed out that the text came from a mere copy provided by Mrs. Houghton, and was thus untrustworthy. Whitman wrote that when Ingram showed her the copy of this letter, she warned him that the "peculiarities of style" and phraseology were so different from Poe's known writings that it was impossible to accept this as a literal transcript, and that he ought not to present it as such. She said he had fully agreed with her opinion, and that he assured her nothing would be published until it had been "revised" and "recast." (The obvious irony here is that many of the letters by and about Poe among Whitman's papers exist only in copies written out by herself.)

Regarding Mrs. Richmond's contributions, Mrs. Whitman said only that she had no idea whether they had been "revised" or "recast," but "one can hardly imagine Poe to have said, 'You are the only being in the whole world whom I have loved at the same time with truth and with purity.'"

Whitman suggested to her readers that as an "offset to the confused and contradictory impression which these letters must inevitably leave," they should study the "Recollections" that Mrs. Richmond's sister Sarah provided for William Gill's "Life of Poe." Whitman praised the "exquisite fidelity" of Sarah Heywood's description of the poet. It is interesting that Whitman made this observation. Miss Heywood depicted Poe--whom, she made it clear, she scarcely knew--as a quiet, reserved, dignified, brilliant gentleman; always charming and courteous, but whose inner self was his own, something kept private from Sarah, from sister Annie, and from everyone else. She found a line from Wordsworth applicable to him: "Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." In other words, he was the antithesis of the undignified, unmanly, ungrammatical jerk depicted in the letters both Mrs. Richmond and Mrs. Whitman claimed to have received from him.

Whitman summarized Ingram's article by stating that if Boileau's axiom, "a man's style is the man himself," is valid, the style of these letters leave us unable to find Poe the man in them. She closed with a quote from Samuel Johnson regarding Boswell: "Sir, if I thought that Bozzy was preparing to write my life, I should be tempted to anticipate him by taking his."

Whitman's short article is apt, witty, and insightful--one of the best brief Poe-related critiques I've seen. She obviously had a personal stake is discrediting letters that delivered such a grievous blow to herself, but that does not discount the validity of her criticism.

However, her article is the final, sardonic twist to her long career as a professional Poe fiancee. She seemed completely unaware--or was she, deep in her heart?--of one fact. All of the cogent arguments she used to cast suspicion on the integrity of these letters and the ladies who presented them--the reliance on mere copies, the startling stylistic variations from Poe's known writings, the inability to find "the man" Poe in any of these missives, the "absence of all testimony as to...authenticity of the letters," the dubious service Poe's "friends" provided him by bequeathing such material to posterity in the first place--all apply with equal force and justice to...herself.

Poe's Weird Women (Part Three) - Annie Richmond

Nancy Locke Heywood Richmond was the wife of Charles Richmond, a wealthy businessman in Lowell, MA. She is known to us through her accounts of a connection she had with Edgar Allan Poe in the last year of his life. He first met her in in July of 1848, when he came to Lowell to deliver a lecture. He made two other visits to the city, in October of that same year, and the spring of 1849. He stayed only briefly each time, and it has been calculated that the total amount of time he spent in the actual society of Mrs. Richmond and her family amounted to no more than about two weeks. However, Mrs. Richmond, although possessed of no literary ability or ambitions herself, was greatly interested in those who were. Having as illustrious a writer as Poe visit her rather prosaic manufacturing town made a great impression upon her. A restless, undomestic woman who was always, in the words of a relative, "given to new fads," she was evidently quite bored with her life and her marriage, and eagerly seized the opportunity to become acquainted with this fascinating literary celebrity.

For years after Poe's death, even Mrs. Richmond's intimates believed the two were no more than friendly acquaintances. A series of letters written by her own brother, Amos Bardwell Heywood, which only surfaced in 1942, give detailed accounts of Poe's Lowell visits, but give no hint of any romantic friendship between the poet and Heywood's sister. (In fact, these letters--assuming they are authentic--indicate that Heywood was fascinated by Poe, but rather disliked him as well.) Then, in the late 1870s, Mrs. Richmond announced to biographer John H. Ingram that Poe had been deeply in love with her. As proof, she gave Ingram copies of letters she said she had received from the poet. (She never showed him--or anyone else--the originals of these letters, none of which have ever been discovered, aside from one or two items of unknown provenance and highly questionable authenticity.)

These strange, hysterical, poorly-written letters depict Poe as consumed by an unbalanced, obsessive passion for the woman he, for reasons unknown, rechristened "Annie." This passion, according to the letters, persisted throughout his brief, ill-fated 1848 relationship with Sarah Helen Whitman--who was simultaneously receiving similar letters expressing Poe's undying love for her. "Annie" apparently was either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that by revealing these letters, she was making Poe look not just like a horribly untalented letter-writer, but an insincere, disloyal human being. It was a great way to make known to the world the incredible wonderfulness of herself, but an odd way to show her devotion to his memory. She claimed repeatedly to Ingram and William Gill that she considered her relationship with Poe too "sacred" to share with the world; that she was only revealing his letters to prove what a fine, noble human being he was. First of all--if her romance with him was so private and "sacred," why tell anyone at all? Why not simply say, "my family and I became friends with him during his Lowell visits, and we all thought he was just wonderful," without dragging in these "sacred" details about his wild love for her? And if she was so concerned about rehabilitating his personal reputation, could even she have been stupid enough to think the way to do so was by displaying to his biographers letters that made him sound like a half-mad, suicidal, infantile wreck of a human being? And one who was capable of something so despicable as wooing one woman with assurances that he loved her only, and was desperate to marry her, while telling "Annie" that he loved her only, and hated the idea of marrying this other woman? If one believes the accounts and the letters provided by both Mrs. Whitman and Mrs. Richmond in toto--and let me make it quite clear that I do not--it puts Poe in the worst light and certainly does not reflect well on the two women, either. It has always been to me one of the stranger ironies in Poeworld, that both Sarah Helen Whitman and "Annie," by making known to the world all the details of their "romances" with him, under the guise of "helping" his good name, managed instead to do incalculable damage to it.

It is a curious fact that Mrs. Richmond's friends and relatives knew her only as "Nancy" during Poe's lifetime. A niece of her husband's later revealed that when she was a child, probably sometime in the late 1850s, her "Aunt Nancy" suddenly announced that she wished to be called "Annie," letting it be known that Poe had said it "sounded better." It was difficult for everyone to make the adjustment, the niece recalled, but everyone eventually complied. (The niece described her aunt as a strong-willed, assertive woman, and "Annie's" surviving letters certainly do have a "She Who Must Be Obeyed" air.) After Charles Richmond died in 1873, his widow made her name change official. We can only conjecture why she was so insistent on this switch, so long after Poe's death, but presumably she wished to publicly associate herself with the late writer's poem "For Annie" and his story "Landor's Cottage," which includes a brief cameo by a character called merely "Annie."

"Annie" soon regretted her decision to "go public" with her tale of romance. Her daughter, Mrs. Caroline Coffin, was infuriated when Ingram's book was released and she learned--only then--of her mother's collaboration with Poe's biographer. According to family friends, she saw "Annie's" account of her great, hitherto secret, platonic love affair with Poe as a cruel insult to the memory of Caroline's beloved father, and she never forgave her mother's emotional infidelity. The family feud that resulted from "Annie's" indiscretion lingered until her death in 1898, making her last years bitter and lonely ones. Her efforts at self-promotion gained her fame of a sort, but at a high price.

I must say, however, that it is hard for me to work up much sympathy for Mrs. Richmond. Her surviving letters show her to have been a strangely unpleasant woman of little intelligence or genuine feeling for others--including Poe. She had a nasty habit of back-biting. She convinced Mrs. Clemm that she was her devoted friend, (she was angling for Clemm to bequeath Poe's papers to her when the older woman died,) while denouncing her to Marie Shew Houghton, Ingram, and Heaven knows who else. She wrote Ingram letters praising him and reviling his biographical rival, William Gill, and wrote Gill letters praising him and reviling Ingram. According to her own account, she encouraged Poe to court and marry Sarah H. Whitman, even though he was writing "Annie" letters assuring her that she was his true love, and disdainfully referring to poor Mrs. Whitman as "her." Any woman who could--particularly while Whitman was still alive--write out such letters and send them to a biographer was someone lacking in some sort of basic humanity. Perhaps even more revealing is the fact that "Annie" appears to have had a close association with none other than our old friend Elizabeth F. Ellet, who was last seen writing the dying Virginia Poe poison-pen letters and blithely agreeing with Frances S. Osgood's claims that Poe had forged her letters. There is extant a letter Ellet wrote "My dear Annie" in 1864. In this letter, Ellet promises her help with some sort of charity fund-raising efforts organized by one of the numerous clubs and societies to which "Annie" belonged. The tone of the letter is quite intimate and affectionate, indicating the two women knew each other well. One wonders what Poe would have made of that.

Perhaps the most disturbing characteristic of Mrs. Richmond's was that her only apparent interest in Poe's memory consisted of glorifying herself by promoting their "romance." She seemed indifferent to his body of work. She could tell Ingram practically nothing about him--she claimed not to remember any of their conversations--and she expressed little curiosity about any aspect of his life that did not directly involve herself. (Her answers to Ingram's efforts to seek Poe information from her largely consisted of "I don't know," "I don't remember," or "I was never interested enough to ask.") Her manifest callousness could be stunning. "Annie"--stupid, shallow, self-absorbed, deceitful and spiteful--was one of the most unlikable of all Poe's Weird Women. If the poet truly imagined himself to be in love with this lady during the last year of his life, it would be the best evidence I've seen yet for the theory that before his death, he was beginning to go mad.