The Death of a Beautiful Woman

Death seemed to stalk the women in Edgar Allan Poe's life. First it came for his mother; next his beloved foster mother; finally, it claimed his young bride. Though his grief over these losses often brought him to the brink of madness, he managed to pour it into his writing, bringing us some of the most darkly beautiful tales in the history of gothic fiction.

"The death of a beautiful woman," Poe wrote in an 1846 essay, "is, unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world"; and the three stories comprising this Pseudoscorpion edition ("Morella", "Berenice", and "Eleonora") certainly bolster that claim. By turns haunting, deranged, and oddly redemptive, they remain some of the author's most iconic works.

This Pseudoscorpion edition also includes the above-mentioned essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," a painstaking analysis of Poe's own creative process.