In the Library
Ligeia
Edgar Allan Poe, 1838
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 25 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 6k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe
Annabel Lee does the same thing as a song, a beloved woman taken by death and a speaker who refuses to let go, but with a sea wind where Ligeia has opium and velvet.
£1.99
La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats
Keats does the same thing in ballad form, a man drawn into the spell of an otherworldly woman with strange eyes, and left pale and alone for it.
£1.99
About the book
He cannot remember where he first met her, or when, and he never learned her family name. What he remembers is her eyes, enormous and blacker than any black, and a learning so vast that he followed it with a child's trust into regions no one else had shown him. Then Ligeia sickens, and she fights death with a ferocity that frightens him more than the dying itself. Poe follows the widower, half lost to opium, into a loveless second marriage and a bridal chamber of his own design: five-sided, hung with heavy cloth of gold whose black arabesques become phantoms as you cross the room. There the fair-haired Lady Rowena falls ill, and the night of watching that follows is the most frightening in all of Poe, a long vigil in which something keeps struggling back toward life. Under the velvet and the dread lies the old line he set at its head, which says that man yields to death only through the weakness of his own feeble will.