Osgood, Frances (1811–1850)

American writer rumored to have had an affair with Edgar Allan Poe. Name variations: Fanny Osgood; (pseudonyms) Florence, Ellen, Kate Carol. Born Frances Sargent Locke on June 18, 1811, in Boston, Massachusetts; died on May 12, 1850, in New York City; daughter of Joseph Locke (a merchant) and Mary (Ingersoll) Foster Locke; sister of writer Andrew Aitchison Locke, and half-sister of writer Anna Maria Wells; educated at home; married Samuel Stillman Osgood (a portrait painter), on October 7, 1835; children: Ellen Frances Osgood (b. 1836); May Vincent Osgood (b. 1839); Fanny Fay Osgood (1846–1847).

Selected works:

The Casket of Fate (1838); A Wreath of Wild Flowers (1838); The Poetry of Flowers and the Flowers of Poetry (1841); The Snowdrop: A New Year's Gift for Children (1842); A Letter about the Lions (1849); Poems (1850).

Frances Osgood was born Frances Sargent Locke in 1811, the second daughter among seven children of Mary Ingersoll Locke and Boston merchant Joseph Locke. She was educated at home during a childhood spent mostly in Hingham, Massachusetts, and by age 14 was publishing in the Juvenile Miscellany under the pseudonym Florence. (Her brother Andrew Aitchison Locke and half-sister Anna Maria Wells would also become writers of some renown.) When she was 25, Frances married Samuel Stillman Osgood, a young Boston portrait painter whom she had met when he asked to paint her portrait. The couple moved to London, where their daughter Ellen Frances Osgood was born in 1836. Osgood moved in London literary circles, contributed to reputable periodicals, and published two collections of verse while in England. Her poetry, which could be humorous but often was romantic and sentimental, employing flowers or birds to expound on themes of love, was generally well reviewed.

Osgood returned to America with her family after the death of her father, and moved to New York City in 1839, the same year her daughter May Osgood was born. Frances' poems and stories began appearing frequently in many of the prominent journals and newspapers of the day, and she became a member of good standing in the city's literary community. She also published several collections of poetry and prose. By the mid-1840s, she and her husband were estranged and living in separate residences. Osgood invariably seems to be described as "childlike," "wraithlike," "ethereal," and even as embodying a sort of "primal innocence," and she reportedly evoked a protective urge in most of her admirers, both male and female. It was apparently this urge to protect her that caused the ugly aftermath of what may have been her love affair with Edgar Allan Poe.

Osgood met Poe early in 1845, shortly after he had lauded her talent as a poet (or, rather, as a woman poet) at a public lecture. Poe was then basking in renown as a result of the first publication of "The Raven," which drew perhaps more attention than had any single poem in some hundred years. While many Poe biographers consider their relationship innocent and fairly inconsequential in and of itself (most believe that it was entirely platonic, and carried out primarily through correspondence), rumors of a physical affair have persisted since the 1840s. According to John Evangelist Walsh, Osgood and Poe had not only an affair but a child, Osgood's last daughter Fanny Fay, who died before she was two years old. Walsh bases this conclusion on a number of letters and circumstances, as well as the fact that Osgood was still living apart from her husband at the time of her last pregnancy, and had told none of her friends that she and her husband had been reconciled. Her friendship, or affair, with Poe quickly became intimate after their first meeting, and their conversations at literary salons were noted among their acquaintances. Osgood would later write of Poe, "For hours I have listened to him, … entranced by the strains of such pure and almost celestial eloquence as I have never read or heard elsewhere." Walsh states that Poe's invalid wife Virginia Poe was pleased by the friendship, which she believed was having a calming effect on her husband and helping to prevent him from falling into ruinous alcoholic binges, until early in 1846, when she discovered a letter Osgood had written.

The letter, which informed Poe that Osgood was three months' pregnant, requested him to visit her to help with choosing a name for the baby before she went into confinement. Virginia, we are told, recalled that Poe had visited Osgood in Rhode Island three months previously, and began to wonder. She told her mother Maria Clemm , who lived with and cared for them, of her vague suspicions, and Clemm made what she no doubt thought were discreet inquiries to Elizabeth Ellet , another literati and a friend of both Osgood's and Poe's, as to whether Osgood had reconciled with her husband. She also happened to mention that Osgood was pregnant. Thus was set in motion a chain of events that all but ruined Poe in New York literary society, and quite probably contributed to the many dark stories and stains on his character that have come down through the years.

Soon, Margaret Fuller and Anne C.L. Botta , friends of Osgood's and acquaintances of Poe's, appeared at his door and requested the return of all letters Osgood had sent him. Poe was offended, and became even more so when, in explanation, they told him that Ellet had seen and described one of those letters. He made an injudicious remark which made Fuller and Botta think that Ellet herself had written him compromising letters, and with that phrase earned Ellet's undying enmity. Her brother threatened him; she published unflattering remarks about him in newspapers and spoke against him to all her friends; and as quiet rumor spread about Osgood's pregnancy and the possible circumstances behind it, the New York literary community blamed Poe for taking advantage of an innocent and closed ranks against him. (Many remembered a story Osgood had published the previous summer, "Ida Grey," which at the time had raised speculation about its main characters' close resemblance to Osgood and Poe.) Those who had already disliked or genuinely loathed him particularly sharpened their knives, and a wildly popular serial story featuring a thinly disguised, mocking portrayal of Poe was published in a local paper.

Osgood did not speak to or correspond with Poe during these incidents. She reconciled with her husband, and gave birth to her sickly baby girl in June 1846. In January 1847, Virginia Poe died. Poe visited Osgood during the following autumn, apparently meeting the baby that may have been his, and legend has it that during this visit he begged Osgood to elope with him. If he did, she refused him, and they never saw each other again. Her baby daughter died shortly thereafter, and by 1849 Osgood was suffering obvious symptoms of tuberculosis and was frequently restricted to her bed. That October, Poe died five days after having been found lying insensible in a Baltimore gutter. A poem Osgood wrote in tribute after learning of his death, "The Hand that Swept the Sounding Lyre," was published in her Poems in 1850, the year she died. This book was dedicated to Rufus Griswold, a journalist, anthologist, and erstwhile colleague of Poe's, who admired Osgood enormously. On the day of Poe's funeral, Griswold had published an anonymous "tribute" that praised him as a writer but vilified him as a person. Maria Clemm then engaged him to edit Poe's collected works, which he published in 1850 with a 35-page so-called memoir of the writer filled with slander and lies and accusations of perversion, insanity and drug use. This memoir was used as the basis for all biographical writing on Poe for nearly 40 years, and remains the source for much of the dark swirl of decadence still surrounding his name. Walsh suggests that the vicious memoir was Griswold's way of avenging Frances Osgood.

sources:

James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women, 1607–1950. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Plumes in the Dust: The Love Affair of Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny Osgood. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1980.

Jacqueline Mitchell , freelance writer, Detroit, Michigan