Poe’s older brother, who had been living with the family since he was a boy, had died from advanced tuberculosis on August 1, 1831. In 1832, Virginia’s family – her grandmother (and Edgar’s) Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, her mother Maria and her brother Henry – rented a home in Baltimore. Virginia Clemm first met her first cousin Edgar Allan Poe in August 1829, four months after his discharge from the Army.

Elizabeth received this pension on behalf of her late husband, who was instrumental in pushing the Tories – British sympathizers – out of Baltimore during the American Revolution. Maria supported the family by sewing and taking in boarders, aided with an annual $240 pension granted to her mother Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, who was paralyzed and bedridden. Clemm had five children from his previous marriage and went on to have three more with Maria.Īfter William Clemm’s death in 1826, he left very little to the family and relatives offered no financial support because they had opposed the marriage. Her father William Clemm, Jr., a hardware merchant, had married her mother Maria Poe after the death of his first wife, Maria’s first cousin Harriet. Virginia Eliza Clemm was born in 1822 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was one of the earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, and is credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.

Cousins by Virginia Hamilton