Dear Mrs Poe,

(Disclaimer: I received an eARC copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.)

How do I love thee,
let me count the ways…

Never in the wild world of my imagination would I ever have thought of writing a period romance with Edgar Allen Poe as the love interest.  And with good reason, popular consciousness likes to paint Poe as some drug fiend/drunkard with a fruit basket of psychological conditions who liked to dabble in writing occasionally.  I think that it scares us to think that this man who made such a massive impact on literature (he invented the mystery genre, for starters) and delved deep into his own personal horrors could have done so sober.  We need him to be drunk or high.

To think otherwise frightens us.

Mrs Poe, oh how you treat Mr. E. Poe as something other than a caricature.  You treat him like a living, breathing human being who, like us all, has been shaped by the events of his life, has made decisions good and bad, and is now trying to make a living doing what he loves while taking care of his family.  he is the portrait of a modern artist trying to make a business of creating and selling art. To create while surrounded by those who want to understand the source of his horrors and quantify his gifts.

Beyond Poe, your Mrs. Frances Osgood sells the story.  Osgood is at once a study of a woman trying to make a literary life in a world that seems unready for a woman to create anything other than a love poem.  She is vibrant, electric, humorous, wonderfully funny, and, all around, a fantastic heroine.  Seeing the world through her eyes, allows us to see Poe in a new light, not this strange, stilted man from textbooks and college lectures but flesh and blood, full of wants and desires, trying to create art and understand what it is his heart wants.

I can relate to that.