Ligeia; Morella; The Oval Portrait

Ligeia; Morella; The Oval Portrait are a short stories in the Gothic horror genre by 19th-century American author and critic Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's short story 'Ligeia' offers the account of an opium-addled narrator who believes that he has seen the resurrection of his beloved first wife, Ligeia, after the death of his second wife, Rowena. "Morella" by Edgar Allan Poe is about a woman who seemingly dies and gives birth to a daughter who looks just like her. Her husband loves the daughter, but she dies when he names her the same as her mother, implying that mother and daughter were the same person. Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic horror story "The Oval Portrait" is among his shortest narratives. As it recounts the story of the death of a painter's young wife,"The Oval Portrait" is actually the 1845 revision of a longer story, "Life in Death," which Poe wrote in 1842, shortly after his beloved young wife, Virginia, first fell ill with the tuberculosis that would kill her five years later. Poe was terrified at the prospect of losing Virginia, and the death of beautiful young women was a frequent topic in his work at this time. In his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition," he even called this the most poetic of all subjects.