Text: James B. Reece, “Emma C. Embury,” Poe's Poe and the New York Literati Story, dissertation, 1954 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 212, continued:]

Emma Catherine Manley Embury (1806-1863) was the daughter of a wealthy physician of New York. She received a good education in the schools of the city and showed an early interest in authorship. By the time of her marriage in 1828 she had attracted some notice through her verses, which she signed “Ianthe,” in the Mirror. Her husband, Daniel Embury, formerly Halleck's fellow employee in the counting house of Jacob Barker, was president of the Atlantic Bank of Brooklyn. In the 1840's, the period of her greatest literary output, her essays, tales, and poetry went chiefly to the ladies’ magazines and to gift books. Her health failed in 1848 and thereafter she published little. [page 213:]

Her first book, Guido, a Tale, Sketches from History, and Other Poems, was published in 1828. Some of her magazine contributions, often of a frankly didactic nature, reappeared in The Blind Girl; with Other Tales (1845) and Glimpses of Home Life; or, Causes and Consequences (1848). Posthumous collections, The Poems of Emma C. Embury and Selected Prose Writings, appeared in 1869 and 1893 respectively.

“Mrs. Embury,” wrote her friend Elizabeth Oakes Smith, delighted to bring around her the wits of the day ....” She frequently held receptions for her literary friends at her luxurious home in Brooklyn. Charles F. Hoffman and Gulian C. Verplanck were among those who often enjoyed her hospitality. According to Mrs. Smith, she was “a woman of high culture and noble impulses, somewhat marred by her excessive conservatism, which grew upon her as she saw with absolute disgust the progress of what I called reform, and she dangerous fanaticism .... ”(1)

Tales by Mrs. Embury appeared frequently in Graham's during Poe's editorial association with that magazine. “She is one of the most nervous of our female writers,” Poe wrote at that time, “and not destitute of originality — that rarest of all qualities [page 214:] in a woman, and especially in an American woman.”(2) In December, 1841, Mrs. Embury was announced as an. editor of Graham's, but this arrangement apparently had little effect upon the conduct of the periodical(3) and does not appear to have necessitated any personal relationship between Poe and his new associate.

Perhaps it was Poe who wrote the brief notice of Mrs. Embury's The Blind Girl; with Other Tales in the Broadway Journal for June 21, 1845. The reviewer characterized the tales as “excellent” and Mrs. Embury as one of the “very best of our female writers.”(4) Under the pen name “Rudolph Hertzman” Mrs. Embury contributed to the Journal a series of five essays entitled “Thoughts of a Silent Man,”(5) in which she discussed such varied topics as Goethe's correspondence, the innate goodness of man, and Platonic love. On three occasions later Poe listed some of the contributors of the Journal,(6) and his failure to include Mrs. Embury's name suggests that he did not know who had written the essays.

The brief “Literati” sketch was marred by no word of dispraise. Mrs. Embury had shown, said Poe, “a poetic capacity of no common order,” and as a writer of tales had no superior among [page 215:] the female authors of America. Her writings gave evidence of imagination and sensibility and her style was “pure, earnest, and devoid of verbiage and exaggeration.” “I make a point of reading all tales to which I see the name of Mrs. Embury appended,” he asserted in concluding his critical remarks.(7)

Inconclusive as they are, the few personal comments literati” sketch constitute the evidence of personal acquaintance between Poe and Mrs. Embury.

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