Edgar Allan Poe — “Berenice”

Reading copy:

• “Berenice” — reading copy

Manuscripts and Authorized Printings:

• Text-01 — “Berenice — A Tale” — 1833-1834 (There are no known draft manuscripts or scratch notes reflecting the original effort of composition. There is no clear reference to indicate when the story was written. Poe first mentions it in a letter of April 30, 1835 to T. W. White, but only after it was published. Mabbott (T&S, 2:208) asserts that it does not appear to have been one of the Tales of the Folio Club, stating only that “the date of its composition may be assumed to be any time between the spring of 1833 and early 1835, when it was sent to White.” It appears to be one of several tales that Poe wrote following his winning of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter award. These stories were accumulated, without any obvious means of publication.)
• Text-02 — “Berenice — A Tale”
  • Text-02a — “Berenice — A Tale” — 1834-1835 (Speculated faircopy manuscript sent to T. W. White for publication in the Southern Literary Messenger. As was typical, the manuscript was probably destroyed in setting type for Text-02b.)
  • Text-02b — “Berenice — A Tale” — March 1835 — Southern Literary Messenger — (Mabbott text A) (The Poe Log, p. 149, states that the March issue was available about April 17, 1835.)
• Text-03 — “Berenice — A Tale”
  • Text-03a — “Berenice — A Tale” — about 1839 — manuscript revisions in “Duane” copy of  Southern Literary Messenger — (Mabbott text B)
  • Text-03b — “Berenice” — 1840 — TGA — (Mabbott text C)
• Text-04 — “Berenice — A Tale”
  • Text-04a — “The Teeth” — 1842 — unused manuscript title revision in TGAPP (T. O. Mabbott states that “the actual changes are lost with the second volume, see Tales & Sketches, 2:208. It is very likely, however, that these changes were incorporated in Text-04b, althought the change in title was reconsidered.)
  • Text-04b — “Berenice” — April 5, 1845 — Broadway Journal — (Mabbott text D) (For Griswold's 1850 reprint of this tale, see reprints, below.)

Reprints:

• “Berenice” — April 11, 1845 — Spirit of the Times (Philadelphia, PA)  (from Text-06)
• “Berenice” — 1850 — WORKS — (Mabbott text E — This is Mabbott's copy-text) (There is insufficient evidence to presume that Griswold had access to a text modified by Poe.Griswold appears to have simply reprinted Text-06, with some minor editorial corrections and changes.)
• “Berenice” — 1867 — Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, first series (New York: W. J. Widdleton), pp. 437-445 (This collection is extracted from the 1850-1856 edition of Poe's Works. It was reprinted several times.)
• “Berenice” — 1874 — Works of Edgar A. Poe, edited by J. H. Ingram, vol. 1, pp. 355-363 (This collection was subsequently reprinted in various forms)

Scholarly and Noteworthy Reprints:

• “Berenice” — 1894-1895 — The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1: Tales, ed. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, Chicago: Stone and Kimball (1:157-168)
• “Berenice” — 1902 — The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2: Tales I, ed. J. A. Harrison, New York: T. Y. Crowell (2:16-26, and 2:313-318)
• “Berenice” — 1978 — The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2: Tales & Sketches I, ed. T. O. Mabbott, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2:207-221)
• “Berenice” — 1984 — Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America), pp. 225-233
• “Berenice” — 2004 — The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.), pp. 140-147
• “Berenice: A Tale” — 2015 — The Annotated Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), pp. 49-58

Instream Comparative and Study Texts:

• “Berenice” — Study Text (SLM-WMD)
• “Berenice” — Comparative Text (SLM, SLM-WMD and TGA)
• “Berenice” — Comparative Text (TGA and BJ)
• “Berenice” — Comparative Text (BJ and WORKS)

Miscellaneous Texts and Related Items:

• “Bérénice” — (French translation by Charles Baudelaire)
  • “Bérénice” — April 17, 1852 — L‘Illustration
  • “Bérénice” — August 2, 1854 — Le Pays
  • “Bérénice” — 1857 — Nouvelles histoires par Edgar Poe, Paris: Michel Lévy frères
• “[Berenice]” — 1884 — Novelas y cuentos, Paris: Garnier Hermanos  (Spanish translation by Carlos Olivera)
• “Bérénice” — 1885 — Oeuvres Choisies d‘Edgar Pöe, Paris: A. Hennuyer  (French translation by William L. Hughes)
• ”Berenice” — December 1, 1947 — a radio show broadcast on The Inner Sanctum show, with Karl Swenson (As was often the case with dramatic presentations of Poe's works, the story has been modified.)
• “Berenice” — 1971 — a reading by Martin Donegan as part of volume VI of Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, issued on the CMS Records label (CMS-626)

• Abel, Darrel, “Coleridge's ‘Life-in-Death’ and Poe's ‘Death-in-Life’,” Notes & Queries (May 1955), 200:218-220
• Baudelaire, Charles, Baudelaire on Poe, translated and edited by Lois and Francis E. Hyslop, Pennsylvania: Bald Eagle Press, 1952 (includes Baudelaire's preface to “Berenice”)
• Blythe, Hal and Charlie Sweet, “Poe's Satiric Use of Vampirism in ‘Berenice’,” Poe Studies (1981), 14:23-24
• Brown, Arthur A., “Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe's ‘Berenice’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, March 1996, 50:448-463
• Brown, Arthur A., ‘A Man Who Dies’: Poe, James, Faulkner and the Narrative Function of Death, PhD disseration, University of California, Davis, 1995
• Davidson, Frank, “A Note on Poe's ‘Berenice’,” American Literature (May 1913), 11:212-213
• Dayan, Joan, “The Identity of Berenice, Poe's Idol of the Mind,” Studies in Romanticism (1984), 23:491-513
• Forclaz, Roger, “A Source for ‘Berenice’ and a Note on Poe's Reading,” Poe Newsletter (Oct. 1968), 1:25-27
• Heartman, Charles F. and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943.
• Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., “Berenice” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Vols 2-3 Tales and Sketches), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.
• Porte, Joel, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and James, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969, pp. 53-94.
• Sloan, David E. E., “Gothic Romanticism and Rational Empiricism in Poe's ‘Berenice’,” American Transcendental Quarterly (Summer 1973), 19:19-26
• Wyllie, John Cooke, “A List of the Texts of Poe's Tales,” Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1941, pp. 322-338.
• Ziolkowski, Theodore, “The Telltale Teeth: Psychodontia to Sociodrama,” Publications of the Modern Language Association (1976), 91:9-22.