Read a summary and analysis of Poe’s “The Black Cat.” While “Ligeia” strives to be a love story, it relies heavily on the sort of Gothic imagery for which Poe became famous. “Ligeia” resembles a criminal story like “The Tell-Tale Heart” with its emphasis on the narrator’s obsession with specific body parts.

‘Ligeia’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1838. Weaving together a number of Poe’s favourite themes and preoccupations, it’s an unsettling and ambiguous tale about love, beauty, death, resurrection, and drugs (yes, we’ll come to that).

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Suffused with a gloom reminiscent of that of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” remains one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories. It achieves Poe’s goal of the “single effect” through the narrator’s focus on Ligeia, his deceased wife.