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An analyst, conning his patient's life in hour-long fragments, may be likened to someone who diagnoses microscopic slides with
an intermittent spotlight. The patient's preanalytic yesterdays are dark, except for the flickering illumination of his memories. Speculation as to his postanalytic future is blurred by the analyst's feelings about his own therapeutic efforts. How much easier for the analytic student to comprehend is a life in its entirety, the end seen as clearly as the beginning, where the records of actual happenings can be read with the associations these happenings evoked. All that is needed is confidence in the honesty and scholarship of the records on which the study is based. Such confidence can be placed in this book since the author has used an authoritative biography of Edgar Allan Poe, Israfel, by Hervey Allen, for her account of actual events, while Poe's own writings, skilfully edited, offer the associative material.
We find that in Poe's childhood and adolescence there was repetition of the same circumstances: much change of scene, poverty, a rejecting father, and a loving mother overcome by chronic illness. The elflike actress, Elizabeth Poe, lay dying of consumption in meager lodgings where her three children, Henry, Edgar, and the baby, Rosalie, played. Their father, David Poe, had left them in want, and perhaps a lover of Elizabeth's played the same rejecting role afterwards. When the mother died in 1811, the two-year-old Edgar was adopted by a Mr. and Mrs. Allan.
Frances Allan gave Edgar luxurious food and lodging, a good education, and social connections, but even before her death in 1829 was unable to shield him from the hostility of her husband John Allan. This hostility, only temporarily mollified by Poe's charms as a small boy, flared up at any misconduct in adolescence and caused Allan to send Edgar to the University of Virginia insufficiently provided with funds. Poe's futile efforts to increase his means by gambling and