An original version is Korean and is given in the link. The following translation is based on Claude with some minor modification.

Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day. It originated in demonstration of the tens of thousands of textile workers who took to the streets of New York in 1908, though why March 8th specifically became the designated date remains unclear. It’s a history less than 120 years old, yet even the origins of how this day was established aren’t widely known.

This is a story from my time dating someone in Providence, someone I’m no longer in contact with. She loved horror movies, and she recommended Netflix’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” to me. I later discovered the story was written by Edgar Allan Poe, and it wasn’t until a year had passed that I learned how deeply connected Poe was to Providence.

After moving into my current apartment, I found that the library near my house was one where Edgar Allan Poe had once lectured, and it was the first time that I heard the name Sarah Helen Whitman as Poe’s lover. In her time, Whitman was a well-regarded literary critic, while Poe was a writer only beginning to gain recognition across America through his poem “The Raven”, just a year before his death. The two became engaged, but various circumstances led to the engagement being broken off, and Edgar died in the street a year later.

Poe did not achieve popular success until he was 36. American literature at the time was dominated by transcendentalism — figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson — and by Puritan-centered writing. His novels written around his thirties, “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, went largely unnoticed in their day, and he could not sustain himself financially through fiction alone. But once “The Raven” brought him success, he began receiving invitations to speak at literary salons.

Frances Osgood, who had frequent exchanges with Poe, invited him to Providence. She intended to introduce him to Whitman, already a celebrated writer and literary critic in New England, but as the story goes, Edgar caught sight of Whitman standing in a rose garden from a distance and could not bring himself to speak to her. Yet Whitman had been reading his work four or five years before he became famous, and as a tribute to him, she wrote a Valentine’s Day poem praising his artistic sensibility.

Whitman was born and raised in Providence, and was the prominent literary figures of literature circles in New England in her era. She was close with Ralph Waldo Emerson and described herself as his disciple, so great was his influence on her. She corresponded with Margaret Fuller, who wrote what is considered one of the first works of feminist literature, and served as vice president of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association.

She contributed more than 80 essays to newspapers. In 1849, Rufus Griswold, the most influential literary editor of the day, included Whitman as a representative American female poet in his anthology, even singling her out in his preface. Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, also sought her contributions, leaving no doubt that she was a prominent literary figure of her time.

When Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, Griswold published an obituary in the newspaper under the pseudonym “Ludwig,” portraying Poe as a drunkard, a fraud, and a man of ruined character. Griswold had been designated as the editor of Poe’s posthumous works, ironically, by Poe himself, and the preface to Poe’s collected works contained a deeply distorted biography. From that point on, Whitman wrote a book in defense of Poe’s work, and after Griswold’s own death, she produced a masterful piece logically refuting all charges against Poe’s literary merit. Yet 160 years later, Whitman is remembered only as Edgar Poe’s former fiancée. What is spoken of are the letters they exchanged, their fateful meeting, and the turbulent dissolution of their engagement, while the 17 years she spent working to restore Poe’s reputation within American literary circles go largely unnoticed.

Edgar Poe and His Critics, written in 1860, reads even today as a work of remarkable logical precision, one that hardly feels 160 years old. It directly refutes Griswold’s 1849 exposé as a text filled with distorted facts and malicious assumptions. To accomplish this, Whitman gathered information from contemporaries who had known Poe, added her own critical insights, and argued methodically for why Poe’s work deserved serious attention.

Critics of the time praised his facility with language but refused to recognize the artistic merit of his work, unsurprising given that the prevailing moralism of Puritan culture made it nearly impossible for gothic horror fiction to find its light. In this essay, Whitman articulates the value of such literature as “a product of deep inner experience and the projection of intense imagination,” writing with measured scholarly calm rooted in her personal memories. She squarely refutes the charge that Poe lacked moral sensibility by drawing on his past work as evidence, and writes with quiet empathy about the drinking that had led to their broken engagement, approaching it from his perspective.

In writing this, Whitman referred to herself as “one of the friends who remembers him,” crafting a precise and deliberate piece so that future generations might judge Poe’s genius fairly. The essay is also regarded as the first work to logically separate an author’s private life from the artistic integrity of their work, a distinction made before Oscar Wilde, and a full 80 years before Roland Barthes argued that a work’s meaning is completed in the moment a reader encounters it, regardless of the author’s intent. It is a distinguished piece of writing that steps beyond the “biographical criticism” that dominated the era and argues, with clear logic, why Poe should not be undervalued.

In 1873, British John Ingram, outraged by Griswold’s false record, began a project to uncover the truth. As Ingram worked on a biography of Poe, he corresponded with Whitman. She provided him with Poe’s original letters and rare materials, and over five years they exchanged correspondence in which she explained and critiqued Poe’s literary theories and the circumstances of his life. Later, when Ingram realized that Whitman also corresponded with another biographer, he published another private letters as a news item, portraying Whitman in inappropriate way. She is said to have responded with a graceful critique of Ingram in the Providence Journal. The 75-year-old woman died of heart disease, complications, and ether addiction one month after writing that piece. Ingram’s biography would go on to establish Poe’s reputation in Europe as “America’s cursed genius.” Yet Whitman, whose contributions were among the greatest to that biography, is mentioned only as “Poe’s former fiancée.” The University of Virginia later commented that the collected letters contain “sharp and insightful discussions of Poe that biographers have not sufficiently utilized.” Mail correspondence can be seen in this link.

The moment when Poe could not bring himself to speak to Whitman tends to be flattened into a simple narrative, which he didn’t approach her because she was beautiful. It is true that Poe later wrote her love letters, but at that time he was a writer only belatedly beginning to receive attention, while Whitman was already a central figure in New England’s literary social world. Yet Ingram referred to the remarkable Edgar Poe and His Critics, the very essay that made his biography of Poe possible, merely as “a charming little book.”

I believe this story deserves to be more widely known. To read Whitman’s 17 years of advocacy after Poe’s death as nothing more than an affectionate tribute to a last love is, I think, to diminish the full arc of her life. Seventeen years of struggle cannot be reduced to love alone. It seems to me that she used every resource available to her, as an intellectual, to defend what she believed was genuine literary value. Without Whitman’s efforts, that singular gothic fiction might well have been forgotten, which might lost to the moral solemnity of antebellum America, or swept away in the aftermath of the Civil War. I find myself wondering how this story could be shaped into something for wider audiences, and who would love it — and then I remember: today is International Women’s Day.