Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe

Virginia Eliza "Sissy" Clemm Poe (August 22, 1822 – January 30, 1847), born Virginia Eliza Clemm, was the wife of Edgar Allan Poe. She was the daughter of William Clemm, Jr. (1779-1826) and Maria Poe Clemm, the sister of Edgar's father David Poe Jr.

A man named William Gowans described Virginia as a woman of "matchless beauty and loveliness" with "a temper and disposition of surpassing sweetness"

Marriage
Virginia Clemm and Edgar Allan Poe, who were first cousins, were married by a Presbyterian minister, Rev. Amasa Converse, on May 16, 1836. Virginia was 13, though the two listed her age as 21, and Edgar was 27. Debate has raged regarding how unusual this pairing was; noted Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn says the arrangement was not particularly unusual, nor was Edgar's nickname of "Sis" or "Sissy".

They were by all accounts a happy and devoted couple. Poe's one-time employer George Rex Graham wrote of their relationship: "His love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty."

Illness and death
However, Virginia developed tuberculosis, first seen in an incident some time in the middle of January, 1842. While singing and playing the piano, Virginia began to bleed from the mouth, "ruptured a blood-vessel," as Edgar described. Her health declined and she became an invalid, which drove Edgar into a deep depression, especially as she occasionally showed signs of improvement. In a letter to friend John Ingram, Edgar described his resulting mental state: "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

When the family (Edgar, Virginia, and her mother, Maria) moved to a cottage in Fordham, New York, Virginia was tended to by 25-year old Marie Louise Shew. Shew knew medical care from her father, a doctor. She actually provided Virginia with a comforter as her only other cover was Edgar's old military cloak.

Virginia died on January 30, 1847 after five years of illness. Shew helped in organizing her funeral, even purchasing her coffin. Shew may have also painted the only image of Virginia, a water color done after her death. Though now buried at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, Virginia was originally buried in a vault owned by the Valentine family, owners of the Fordham cottage.

In 1875, the same year Edgar was reburied, the cemetery in which she lay was destroyed and her remains were almost forgotten. An early Poe biographer, William Gill, gathered her bones and stored them in a box he hid under his bed. Gill's story was reported in the Boston Herald twenty-seven years after the event. Gill says that he had visited the Fordham cemetery in 1883 at exactly the moment that the sexton Dennis Valentine held Virginia's bones in his shovel, ready throw them away as unclaimed. Gill took the remains and corresponded with Neilson Poe and John Prentiss Poe in Baltimore, and arranged to bring the box down to be laid on Edgar's left side in a small bronze casket. Virginia's remains were finally buried with her husband's in 1885 on January 19 - the seventy-sixth anniversary of her husband's birth and nearly ten years after his current monument was erected. The same man who served as sexton during Edgar's original burial and his exhumations and reburials was also present at the rites which brought his body to rest with Virginia and Virginia's mother Maria Clemm.

References in literature
Edgar's love for Virginia, and the effect that her suffering and ultimate death had upon him, are reflected in his tragic poems "Annabel Lee" and "Ulalume", and possibly in the decline of his mental state in his last years. The short story "Eleonora" may also reference Virginia's illness, though it was published before her death.