page_title: Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe
section_title: Marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe / Biography / Marriage
caption_attribution_description: English: The Marriage bond of Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Clemm. From a 1900 edition of James A. Harrison's Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe Español: Acta de matrimonio de Edgar Allan Poe y Virginia Eliza Clemm. De la edición de 1900 de Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe de James A. Harrison.
context_page_description: Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe was the wife of American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The couple were first cousins and publicly married when Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe was 27. Biographers disagree as to the nature of the couple's relationship. Though their marriage was loving, some biographers suggest they viewed one another more like a brother and sister. In January 1842, she contracted tuberculosis, growing worse for five years until she died of the disease at the age of 24 in the family's cottage, at that time outside New York City.
  Along with other family members, Virginia Clemm and Edgar Allan Poe lived together off and on for several years before their marriage. The couple often moved to accommodate Poe's employment, living intermittently in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. A few years after their wedding, Poe was involved in a substantial scandal involving Frances Sargent Osgood and Elizabeth F. Ellet. Rumors about amorous improprieties on her husband's part affected Virginia Poe so much that on her deathbed she claimed that Ellet had murdered her.
context_section_description: Marriage plans were confirmed and Poe returned to Baltimore to file for a marriage license on September 22, 1835. The couple might have been quietly married as well, though accounts are unclear. Their only public ceremony was in Richmond on May 16, 1836, when they were married by a Presbyterian minister named Rev. Amasa Converse. Poe was 27 and Virginia was 13, though her age was listed as 21. This marriage bond was filed in Richmond and included an affidavit from Thomas W. Cleland confirming the bride's alleged age. The ceremony was held in the evening at the home of a Mrs. James Yarrington, the owner of the boarding house in which Poe, Virginia, and Virginia's mother Maria Clemm were staying. Yarrington helped Maria Clemm bake the wedding cake and prepared a wedding meal. The couple then had a short honeymoon in Petersburg, Virginia.
  Debate has raged regarding how unusual this pairing was based on the couple's age and blood relationship. Noted Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn argues it was not particularly unusual, nor was Poe's nicknaming his wife "Sissy" or "Sis". Another Poe biographer, Kenneth Silverman, contends that though their first-cousin marriage was not unusual, her young age was. It has been suggested that Clemm and Poe had a relationship more like that between brother and sister than between husband and wife. Biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn disagreed with this view, citing a fervent love letter to argue that Poe "loved his little cousin not only with the affection of a brother, but also with the passionate devotion of a lover and prospective husband." Some scholars, including Marie Bonaparte, have read many of Poe's works as autobiographical and have concluded that Virginia died a virgin. It has been speculated that she and her husband never consummated their marriage, although no evidence is given. This interpretation often assumes that Virginia is represented by the title character in the poem "Annabel Lee": a "maiden... by the name of Annabel Lee". Poe biographer Joseph Wood Krutch suggests that Poe did not need women "in the way that normal men need them", but only as a source of inspiration and care, and that Poe was never interested in women sexually. Friends of Poe suggested that the couple did not share a bed for at least the first two years of their marriage but that, from the time she turned 16, they had a "normal" married life until the onset of her illness.
  Virginia and Poe were by all accounts a happy and devoted couple. Poe's one-time employer George Rex Graham wrote of their relationship: "His love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty." Poe once wrote to a friend, "I see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife." She, in turn, by many contemporary accounts, nearly idolized her husband. She often sat close to him while he wrote, kept his pens in order, and folded and addressed his manuscripts. She showed her love for Poe in an acrostic poem she composed when she was 23, dated February 14, 1846:
  Ever with thee I wish to roam —
  
  Dearest my life is thine.
  
  Give me a cottage for my home
  
  And a rich old cypress vine,
  
  Removed from the world with its sin and care
  
  And the tattling of many tongues.
  
  Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
  
  Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
  
  And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
  
  Never wishing that others may see!
  
  Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
  
  Ourselves to the world and its glee —
  
  Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.
caption: Virginia and Edgar's marriage certificate
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