SOURCE: Reilly, John E. “Mrs. Osgood and The Broadway Journal.” Duquesne Review 12, no. 2 (fall 1967): 131-44.

In the following essay, Reilly explores how Osgood exploited the “melodramatic potentialities” of her literary courtship with Edgar Allan Poe to advance her career as a poet.

Among the legends surrounding Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most enduring and certainly one of the most sensational is that he was a great lover, a kind of indigenous Casanova whose Lenores, Ligeias, and Annabel Lees are but the sallow surrogates of a host of warmblooded realities with whom Poe had consorted. Like most legends, this one has some basis in fact, remote through it happens to be. Poe did court the favor of the female sex, as it was called in his day; he did assume the romantic posture of the gallant; and he did enjoy the attentions of certain ladies, especially those of...