I picked this up in an independent bookstore in Decatur, GA while my three year old grandson ate an ice cream cone outside. Edgar Allan Poe is said to have lived his last years in Baltimore, and our football team is called the Ravens, after Poe’s famous poem, so I was curious.
The first couple of pages grabbed me. I’ll often read the first sentence or two to test the pull of a story. This one tugged pretty good; I was on page five before I knew it. In the first paragraph reference is made to “girls who troll the streets of Corlear’s Hook,” an area of lower Manhattan frequented by sailors on the prowl, revealing the derivation of the term “hooker”. Interesting. The next page has a character, an editor named George Pope Morris, boasting that his book on flowers had recently been published by Mr. Harper, referring to the founder of the famed publishing house. A quick check of Wikipedia revealed that Mr. Morris was also a real person, best known for the poem “Woodman Spare That Tree.” One of the things I like about historical fiction is that it is informative. This story is packed with recognizable names from the mid-nineteenth century, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Morse, Horace Greeley, and Phineas T. Barnum, all of whom were contemporary with, and acquainted with, Edgar Allan Poe.
Now we come to the story’s narrator, Frances Sargent Osgood, who we learn was also real, a poet, and who was famous for carrying on an exchange of romantic poems with Poe, which were published in a popular periodical of the day. It created a bit of a scandal as both Osgood and Poe were married. Cullen portrays them as madly in love but unable to act on their desire, other than through stolen glances and secrecy, because of their marital obligations. That sounds like a banal plot device, but Cullen enriches it by presenting a complex picture of their respective situations, and what adult’s situation is not complex?
Frances is married to a fairly talented and successful artist, a painter of portraits, mostly of wealthy attractive women. His work takes him away from home and out of touch (no cellphones, no phones at all) to unknown places for unknown periods, leaving Frances with no financial support and the appearance of having been abandoned. Frances works to make a living off her poetry. Her wayward husband is handsome and charming, and Frances once loved him, and could again, if he’d just come home. He is also the father of her two daughters.
Poe is married to his first cousin, Virginia, more than ten years his junior, strikingly pretty but sickly. He lives with her and her mother, a common woman not well suited to the stylish and insular drawing rooms of New York City. Virginia’s poor health is a constant burden for Poe, a burden that is also freighted with guilt from feeling romantic love for Mrs. Osgood. Then there’s the shortage of money. Despite the success of “The Raven”, Poe struggles to earn enough money to warm a shabby house in a shabby neighborhood of New York, while trying to keep up appearances for the rich movers and shakers and literati of the city, who make up his paying readership.
It’s a well rounded story, engagingly told. The romantic feelings seemed a bit overwrought to me, as in, “The sight of his beautiful fingers, so sensitive, so intelligent, made me want to weep.” Expressions like ‘Spare me’ and ‘Get over it’ and ‘Suck it up’ occured to me. But Poe lived and wrote in the period of Romanticism, and I feel certain Ms. Cullen wrote in that style on purpose to cause the story to fit more perfectly into its nineteenth century setting. Well done, Ms. Cullen.
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