Ligeia

"Ligeia" is an early short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1838. The story follows an unnamed narrator and his wife Ligeia, a beautiful and intelligent raven-haired woman. She falls ill, composes "The Conqueror Worm", and quotes lines attributed to Joseph Glanvill (which suggest that life is sustainable only through willpower) shortly before dying. After her death, the narrator marries the Lady Rowena. Rowena becomes ill and she dies as well. The distraught narrator stays with her body overnight and watches as Rowena slowly comes back from the dead – though she has transformed into Ligeia. The story may be the narrator's opium-induced hallucination and there is debate whether the story was a satire. After the story's first publication in The American Museum, it was heavily revised and reprinted throughout Poe's life.

Plot summary

The story is told by a unnamed narrator who describes the qualities of Ligeia: a beautiful, passionate and intellectual woman, raven-haired and dark-eyed. He thinks he remembers meeting her "in some large, old decaying city near the Rhine." He is unable to recall anything about the history of Ligeia, including her family's name, but remembers her beautiful appearance. Her beauty, however, is not conventional. He describes her as emaciated, with some "strangeness." He describes her face in detail, from her "faultless" forehead to the "divine orbs" of her eyes. They marry, and Ligeia impresses her husband with her immense knowledge of physical and mathematical science, and her proficiency in classical languages. She begins to show her husband her knowledge of metaphysical and "forbidden" wisdom.

Jeff

Jeff is a short form of the English given name Jeffrey, which derives from a medieval variant of Geoffrey. Jeff is especially used in the US and Canada.

Music

Ligeia Mare

Ligeia Mare /laɪˈdʒiːə ˈmɑːriː/ is a lake in the north polar region of Titan, the planet Saturn's largest moon. It is the second largest known body of liquid on Titan, after Kraken Mare. Larger than Lake Superior on Earth, it is composed of nearly pure liquid methane. It is located at 78° N, 249° W, and has been fully imaged by the Cassini spacecraft. It measures roughly 420 km (260 mi) by 350 km (217 mi) across, has a surface area of about 126,000 km², and a shoreline over 2000 km (1240 mi) in length. The lake may be hydrologically connected to the larger Kraken Mare. Its namesake is Ligeia, one of the sirens in Greek mythology.

Description

Ligeia Mare has two predominant types of coastline, "crenulated" and "subdued". The former is characterized by hummocky, eroded terrain, the latter by lower, smoother topography and the presence of more numerous and longer channels. Crenulated terrain predominates on the eastern and southern sides of the lake; subdued terrain to the west and north. Except in the southeast where the rough topography extends to the coast, hummocky terrain tends to be separated from the shoreline by a more subdued bench. The coast has numerous bays that appear to be flooded river mouths (rias), and unlike at Ontario Lacus there are no visible subaerial delta deposits, possible evidence of a recent sea level rise. In the northeast and northwest sections of the mare, along about a quarter of the total shoreline, there are extensive areas where the depth is less than 5 m, shallow enough for imaging radar to penetrate to the bottom. 2013 radar measurements by Cassini indicate parts of the lake are 170 m deep which implies the liquid must be very pure methane since the radar signal was able to pass right through it. The surface of the lake appears very smooth on radar; it is flat within a few millimeters.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (/poʊ/; born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. Widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. 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.

Born in Boston, Poe was the second child of two actors. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died the following year. Thus orphaned, the child was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia. Although they never formally adopted him, Poe was with them well into young adulthood. Tension developed later as John Allan and Edgar repeatedly clashed over debts, including those incurred by gambling, and the cost of secondary education for the young man. Poe attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. Poe quarreled with Allan over the funds for his education and enlisted in the Army in 1827 under an assumed name. It was at this time his publishing career began, albeit humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian". With the death of Frances Allan in 1829, Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement. Later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point and declaring a firm wish to be a poet and writer, Poe parted ways with John Allan.

Edgar Allen

Edgar Allen (May 2, 1892 – February 3, 1943) was an American anatomist and physiologist. He is known for the discovery of estrogen and his role in creating the field of endocrinology.

Born on Cañon (Canyon) City, Colorado, Allen was educated at Brown University. After serving in World War I he took a position at Washington University in St. Louis until, in 1923, he was appointed to the chair of anatomy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Ten years later he was appointed to the chair at Yale University.

At Missouri, he began his studies of sex hormones. While it was commonly believed at the time that the female reproductive cycle was controlled by substance in the corpus luteum, Allen sought the answer in the follicles surrounding the ovum, leading to his discovery of estrogen, though it was identified six years later by Adolf Butenandt in 1929.

Allen died of a heart attack in 1943 while on duty with the United States Coast Guard.

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