The New York Times

Is it true that Edgar Allan Poe cheated on his tubercular, insipid young wife with a lady poet he’d met at a literary salon? Cullen makes you hope so. The man who wrote of “the bells, bells, bells” deserved a little euphony. This tale is told from the point of view of his likely lover, Frances Osgood, and Cullen makes her warm and sympathetic. When Frances first meets Poe, she and her two daughters are living in New York at the home of Eliza and John Russell Bartlett (the lexicographer who compiled the Dictionary of Americanisms) while her philandering husband is off gallivanting with his wealthy conquests. Poe extols Mrs. Osgood’s poetry in public, and after their own gallivanting begins, they publish love poems to each other in The Broadway Journal — pseudonymously, but nobody is fooled. Succumbing to Poe’s pursuit, Frances frets over his notoriety and her reputation: “I had never been so cherished, so valued, so worshiped by a man.” But is her lover a “guilt-ridden man-beast, capable of murder,” as his foes and his fiction suggest, or is he the “respectful, loving mate” of her soul?