Mrs. Sarah Anna Lewis

(Born: April 1824 - Died: November 24, 1880)

American poet and playwright Sarah Anna Robinson was born near Baltimore, MD. She married Sylvanus D. Lewis in 1841 (although divorce records state that she was married in September 1838). In later years, Mrs. Lewis helped to take care of Mrs. Clemm when Poe was away, and his reliance on her for such matters, as well as financial considerations, probably forced him to put aside his critical eye and actively promote her writings. (For the apparent promise of $100, see Mrs. M. G. Nichols’ recollections from 1863.) She was somewhat free with her first name, sometimes calling herself Estelle and later merely Stella. Her first book of poems, Records of the Heart (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1844), gives her name clearly on the title page as “Mrs. Sarah Anna Lewis.” Her second book, The Child of the Sea and Other Poems (New York: George P. Putnam, 1848), gives her name as “Mrs. S. Anna Lewis.”

A letter of September 3, 1849 from her busband, S. D. Lewis, to R. W. Griswold takes great pains to claim that her baptismal name was Estelle, and that she and her family habitually used the shorter form of Stella, which she sometimes wrote as “S. Anna,” and that he had himself erroneously expanded her first name as Sarah. He had apparently already asked Griswold to change her name in the second edition of The Female Poets of America, offering to pay for the cost of doing so. (The letter is now in the Boston Public Library, Griswold Collection, Box 10, Ms. Gris. 684). The idea that her husband of three years, who had already known her as a student at the Troy Female Seminary, where he was a professor, makes it difficult to imagine that he really did not know his own wife’s first name. J. H. Ingram, in an article called “Edgar A. Poe and ‘Stella’,” in the July 1907 issue of the Albany Review (pp. 417-423), after mentioning the letter from Mr. Lewis to Griswold, suggests that “when she entered into the world of letters her ambition craved a more romantic appleation, and she adopted that of Estelle” (p. 418). Her last several books carried her name only as “by Stells,” with no middle or last name.

She divorced her husband in 1858, travelled to Europe and moved to London, England, living for her last decade in Bedford Square. She is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, NY, where she was interred on June 3, 1881 (lot: 23452 section: 155), her body having been shipped back to her home country.