“Mrs. Poe” - Lynn Cullen

🖋 Cullen bases her story on the very real and very scandalous relationship between famed poet Frances Osgood and Edgar Allen Poe. Their published exchange of romantic poetry was all the more controversial as both were married to other people.

🖋 Frances Osgood narrates events, beginning with her publisher’s encouragement that she take inspiration from the success of Poe’s “The Raven” and pen a dark tale herself. Little does she know that she herself will soon become enmeshed in a tragic web.

🖋 It was clever on Cullen’s part to title her novel after Mrs. Poe. Although Osgood and Edgar Allen Poe are very much the main actors, the role of Mrs. Poe is undeniably critical, and exerts a powerful, magnetic pull throughout the novel.

🖋 Ghoulish elements run (fittingly) through the novel. At times it feels almost as though this depiction of the doomed lovers Poe and Osgood, was lifted from one of Poe’s own dark, shivery poems. The themes of love betrayal, guilt, and madness are delicious and ever-present in Cullen’s prose.

🖋 My only tiny criticism is that in setting the stage among the glittering literary scene of 1840s NY, Cullen engages in a distracting amount of famous name-dropping which doesn’t advance the plot appreciably.