The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  “It was the stepfather.” The chunk of doughnut crumpled between her fingers, and she hastily swept the crumbs into a neat pile and covered them with her napkin.

  Impulsively I reached out and squeezed her hand. Then I turned to my newfound niece. She didn’t look so very much like Amanda, after all. Just the thick brown hair, the slim, rangy body, and—well, yes, the long thin nose, and delicate mouth. Her eyes were different, though—blue to Amanda’s hazel. No one in the world has Amanda’s beautiful eyes. “Courtney, who do you think did it?”

  “It was definitely Edgar Allan Poe. He sounds like such a loser.” She had Amanda’s clear, precise voice.

  “And you, Amanda?”

  My daughter frowned as she fished three doughnuts from the bubbling oil in the cast-iron Dutch oven. With her metal tongs she dropped each into a sugar-filled paper bag. “It was suicide. Had to be. Emmeline’s poetry was all she lived for, and it had been stolen from her.” Amanda shook the bag, then held it open in front of me. “What do you think, Mom? You’re the literary detective here. In your informed opinion, who do you think murdered the poet Emmeline Foster?”

  I raised my shoulders, spread my hands. “Who knows?” I replied. I peered in the bag and plucked out the largest doughnut. “It’s all a mystery to me.”

  Afterword

  The historical circumstances reflected in the journals of the fictional Emmeline Foster are based on research into the New York City literary milieu of the 1840’s. Although the poet Emmeline Foster herself exists only in the pages of this novel, other writers mentioned in her journal—Frances Sargent Osgood, Horace Greeley, Anne Lynch—actually lived, and socialized at the same Manhattan literary salons Emmeline attends. Edgar Allan Poe also frequented these salon gatherings, and, except for his dealings with the imaginary Emmeline, all other tales of his life recounted in The Raven and the Nightingale are based on sound biographical and historical evidence—even a preoccupation with the issue of plagiarism. I have taken the title of Emmeline Foster’s poem “The Bird of the Dream” from a letter published in the Broadway Journal when Poe was editor of that publication. According to Kenneth Silverman, author of Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, an anonymous letter published on 1 March, 1845, explicitly raised the issue of “The Raven” and plagiarism, comparing:

  “The Raven” with an anonymous poem called “The Bird of the Dream.” [The writer] pointed out fifteen distinct “identities,” such as the existence in both poems of a broken-hearted lover and of a bird at the poet’s window. He made it clear at the same time that no “imitation” by Poe was involved. (251)

  Silverman goes on to suggest that “the great likelihood” is that Poe himself, with the aid of a friend, concocted the letter in the first place, thus simultaneously raising the possibility of plagiarism and denying that it ever took place. One can only speculate why Poe might have felt such a ploy was necessary. The verse from Emmeline Foster’s “The Bird of the Dream” is my own creation; it is not based on the Broadway Journal poem.

  The chapter epigraphs in The Raven and the Nightingale are taken from the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American poets.

  About the Author

  JOANNE DOBSON, an associate professor of English at Fordham University, lives in Westchester, New York. She is the author of four Karen Pelletier mysteries, Agatha Award-nominated Quieter than Sleep, The Northbury Papers, The Raven and the Nightingale, and Cold and Pure and Very Dead.

  If you enjoyed Joanne Dobson’s

  The Raven and the Nightingale, you

  won’t want to miss any of her academic

  mysteries featuring Professor Karen

  Pelletier. Look for Quieter than Sleep

  and The Northbury Papers at your

  favorite booksellers.

  And you won’t want to miss

  Joanne Dobson’s

  Cold and Pure and Very Dead,

  available wherever

  Bantam Books are sold.