The average age of first marriage in the US has always been above 20 years old for women. The Census (warning PDF) only officially started tracking the number in 1890 when the average age was 22. That is of course well after Poe's time. But some researchers have combed through local marriage records and found that it really hadn't varied much throughout the 19th century.

Teen brides weren't that uncommon though. But it much less common for younger teens. So while a 16 or 18 year old getting married wouldn't have scandalized anyone, a 13 year old getting married might have. But it was legal and sanctioned. The age of consent in Maryland in the 1800s was 10, assuming the girl's guardians approved. When young teens married, it was almost always to another teen. What would have been scandalous would have been the 27 year old Edgar marrying a girl literally half his age.

And there is some reason to believe that Poe himself regarded it as suspicious. He put Virginia's age as 21 on the original marriage certificate. I've seen arguments that this was to make it socially acceptable. I've also seen arguments that this was to avoid any questions about her guardians. They publicly re-did the ceremony a year later. So he was willing to publicly marry a 14 year old, even if he thought marrying a 13 year old was scandalous.

So scandalous? Maybe. It was certainly unusual, if legal, at the the time.

As to their personal life? I have no idea. Couples of the time didn't usually confirm or deny whatever sexual relationship they had. It wasn't proper for public discourse. And very few people even included sexual discourse in private letters or journals. There is no real reason to suspect that they weren't having sex, as that would be the normal course of things in a marriage. But frankly even that is speculation. It is likely we will never know what Edgar's and Virginia's sex life was like.

Possibly the first thing to address is that this is a question concerning a historical figure’s private life and in the early nineteenth century, people’s private lives were exceptionally private. What might at first seem to be the Holy Grail in unraveling Poe’s marriage can still leave us with questions.

There is his letter to his aunt Maria Clemm and also to his cousin Virginia dated August 29th, 1835.

In this letter, which was very damaged when found, he addresses himself mainly to his aunt, but this is not all surprising. When writing the letter he had not yet wed his cousin and so was asking her mother to bring her to him. He was responding to a letter from her in which she must have indicated that she might take her daughter to Neilson Poe. Neilson was Poe’s rival and cousin and it seems he did not care to think of his Aunt and cousin going to Neilson and was sure that this would mean the end of his relationship with Virginia.

He writes, “It is useless to disguise the truth that when Virginia goes with N.P. that I shall never behold her again.” This might lead one to think Virginia was going to marry Neilson, but this was not the case. The general consensus was that Neilson just didn’t want Virginia to marry Poe. If this was because of their age difference, because he didn’t like Edgar, or some other reason- is not known.

He concludes his message to his aunt saying, “Ask Virginia. Leave it to Her. Let me have, under her own hand, a letter, bidding me good bye - forever - and I may die - my heart will break - but I will say no more. E.A.P Kiss her for me - a million times.”

Considering this it is hard to imagine someone pleading for another if the feelings were only that of a brother and sister. It seems hard to imagine that Neilson would have felt the need to keep Virginia away from Poe if it was only sibling love at sake.

He then writes a short note to Virginia.

“Virginia, my love, my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey, think well before you break the heart of your Cousin, Eddy.”

He calls her Sissy, yes, but there’s nothing that indicates this means sister. As a touch of affection he calls her his little wifey, before they have even been married, when it seems she is going to leave him so that she can go out in society. I’ll leave it to you to decide if these are the words of a (possibly hopeful) lover or brother.

Poe had enemies and competitors and around him swirled many rumors, it is difficult to find the truth from the fabrication: After Virginia died there were those that said Poe was strange in the way he showed affection (but we do not know what specifically made it strange). Lambert Wilmer in 1866 said that Poe was very affectionate, but that Virginia might not have loved him as much as he loved her. Still one of her last acts on this earth was to kiss a portrait of him that she had under her pillow.

The problem with peeking into the private life of someone like Poe is that the majority of what remains of him is his work: poems and stories. Much of the scholarship done on Poe has been in these areas. Yet, I think it is dangerous to read works of fiction in search of autobiographical information. There is no way to know that Poe was thinking of Virginia when he wrote “Annabel Lee”: I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than a love- I and my Annabel Lee.

The question then is: Would this marriage have been scandalous or abnormal for the time?

For this we must ask: What was a normal marriage of the time (early nineteenth century America)?

Legally speaking a marriage united man and woman into a single identity with the assumption that there was no backing out of the deal (Hartog, p.3-4). What Edgar and Virginia entered into was something that, at least legally speaking, was a very serious matter. This doesn’t mean that there was no divorce or separation. There is nothing in Poe’s letter, for instance, that indicates the marriage was done on a whim, but instead that when Virginia came to Poe- they would be married. We cannot know with certainty how exactly Poe felt towards the thirteen year old Virginia and if people, in general, would have thought that this was inappropriate.

Age of consent laws were usually from 10-12 in the U.S. In fact, Stephen Robertson from the University of Sydney, argues that people of the nineteenth century weren’t particularly preoccupied with a girl’s specific age but more whether she fit their expectations of a child or not. By this rationale, it would matter more how Virginia presented herself. She was thirteen and could be seen as a woman. Suggestions have been made that Neilson’s offer to take in young Virginia were to prevent her from being married at such a young age. I cannot determine the validity of this. In a letter Edgar wrote to Neilson in 1845 he is friendly and speaks hopefully of bringing Virginia to see her sisters even though she was in poor health from a busted blood vessel (this was actually the beginning of her battle with consumption that would end in her death). If Neilson was uneasy about Virginia’s age when she married, he eventually got over it- which is not hard to imagine since, as each year passed, there was less to be concerned with.

Various questionable sources give the average age of a woman to first marry in the early nineteenth century as 15-20. This is wide range, indeed, but it shows that Virginia was still young regardless. However, there is no clear evidence that supports the idea that there was anything shocking about their marriage at the time. They had a private ceremony, but then a public one. Like so much about Poe- there is not really enough to go on.

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Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore is a wonderful source and I encourage everyone to make a visit to the city and see the small Poe house and museum there and all explore the wealth of information on their website.

Hartog, Hendrik, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America,”, Georgetown University Law Center, 1991,

Robertson, Stephen, “Age of Consent Laws,” Children and Youth in History- Case Studies