The Raven's Bride A Novel

When eight-year-old Virginia "Sissy" Clemm meets her handsome cousin, Edgar Allan Poe, he seems the very image of the make-believe husband she conjures up in childhood games. He's thirteen years her elder, but kind, soft-spoken, brooding, and handsome. Eddy floats in and out of her life as he fails his way through West Point and then the army. Each time he returns to Baltimore, their odd friendship grows, and her understanding of the moody, troubled writer deepens. As Sissy prepares for a career on the musical stage, her childhood crush turns to love. When she is 13, Eddy proposes marriage, swearing to care for her forever. Yet even child brides eventually grow up, and it's really Eddy who needs caring for, who leans on her. She gains his complete devotion, true -- yet also must endure his abrupt disappearances, strange moods, and the aftermath of alcoholic binges. Then, when she falls ill, Poe's greatest fear that he'll once again lose a woman he loves drives him both to near-madness, and to his greatest literary achievement.This provocative novel explores the mysterious and confounding relationship between Poe and Sissy Clemm, his great love and constant companion. Lenore Hart, author ofBecky,explores love, loss, the afterlife, and American literature's most haunted and demonized literary figure, by imagining the real, beating heart of the woman who loved and inspired him and whose absence ultimately destroyed him.

Lenore Hart is the author of Waterwoman, Ordinary Springs, The Treasure of Savage Island and Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher. She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Wilkes Univesity, and at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Cape Cod. She lives on the eastern shore of Virginia.

"Lenore Hart takes on one the great biographical mysteries of American literary culture -- the strange and passionate love between Edgar Allan Poe and Sissy, his child-bride.  Only an exceptionally daring novelist would venture in this dark wood, yet Hart has charged bravely into the thicket.  She returns from the wilderness with a lively, compelling narrative in Sissy's voice, here wonderfully imagined and believable, even when verging on the fantastic.   The Raven's Bride is a bristling novel that adds considerably to the legend of Poe and his ill-fated marriage, evoking a world long gone with an eye for the exact detail." --Jay Parini, author of The Last Station