Edgar Allan Poe met Sarah Helen Whitman for the first time at her home in Providence, Rhode Island, on 21 September 1848. Both were widowed; he was in his thirty-ninth year, and she in her forty-fifth. Poe launched immediately into an intense and what proved to be a stormy courtship, pursuing her relentlessly until she consented late in December to an "immediate marriage." Two days later, however, the engagement was broken off, and Poe returned from Providence to New York, never to see her again. To these three months Sarah Whitman owes much of the recognition she enjoys even today, principally among Poe's biographers. They identify her as "Poe's Helen," as that eccentric Providence widow who came within a hairbreadth of marrying him and who subsequently stood almost alone defending his character against defamers who pounced upon him immediately following his death. But recognition of this nature has been a...