Poe & Fanny : A Novel
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books
plain
2014-06-07T17:13:33-07:00
May, John. Poe & Fanny : A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004.
This book focuses on the relationship bewteen Frances Sargent Osgood "Fanny" and Edgar Allan Poe. The author elavates the known facts about the two into the realm of being full blown lovers. He takes it as far as to say that Poe fathered Fanny's third child. In real life, this idea is wholly plausible and cannot be proven nor disproven with certainty. All the passages included in the book are genuine passages from the poems that Fanny and Poe published. It begins with Poe already married to Virginia Clemm and slowly giving himself over to alcoholism. It ends prior to Virginia's death at the time that Poe left the Broadway Journal.
The book is written in the third person. If it were not for the fact that it is a work of real person fiction, it would not have any other association with Edgar Allan Poe or his style of writing. It is not a horror story nor a detective story, but a love story with an end that is based within a semblance of reality and not the paranormal.
There is a short family tree at the beginning of the book. At the end there is an afterword that includes the author's own story about writing the book and also the history behind the book. Also included are the full transcripts of all the poems Poe and Fanny wrote to each other.
