Text: Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Mary Gove” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Vol. IV: The Literati of New York City (2026), pp. 71-72 (This material is protected by copyright)

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MARY GOVE.(1)

Mrs. Mary Gove, under the pseudonym of “Mary Orme,” has written many excellent papers for the magazines. Her subjects are usually tinctured with the mysticism of the transcendentalists, but are truly imaginative. Her style is quite remarkable for its luminousness and precision — two qualities very rare with her sex. An article entitled “The Gift of Prophecy,” published originally in “The Broadway Journal,”(2) is a fine specimen of her manner.

Mrs. Gove, however, has acquired less notoriety by her literary compositions than by her lectures on physiology to classes of females.(3) These lectures are said to have been instructive and useful; they certainly elicited much attention. Mrs. G. has also given public discourses on Mesmerism, I believe, and other similar themes — matters which put to the severest test the credulity or, more properly, the faith of mankind.(4) She is, I think, a Mesmerist, a Swedenborgian, a phrenologist, a homœopathist, and a disciple of Priessnitz — what more I am not prepared to say.(5)

She is rather below the medium height, somewhat thin, with dark hair and keen, intelligent black eyes. She converses well and with enthusiasm. In many respects a very interesting woman.

[[Notes]]

[page 72:]

1. Mary Sargent Neal Gove, August 10, 1810 - May 30, 1884, later became Mrs. Nichols, and is usually called Mrs. Gove-Nichols. She gave her reminiscences of Poe (in fiction form) in a novel, Mary Lyndon, New York, 1855. Later in the London Sixpenny Magazine, February 1863, she gave them directly. This article was completely reprinted in sections by Woodberry, 1909, and again in a small separate volume, New York, 1931. She had an inaccurate memory. She held “advanced” views on sex.

2. The paper referred to is in the Broadway Journal, October 4, 1845.

3. See her Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology, Boston, 1842.

4. Compare Eureka, paragraph 86 (H. Xvi, 223).

Magnetism, or Mesmerism, or Swedenorgianism, or Transcendentalism, or some other equally delicious ism of the same species.

5. A more elaborate list may be found in the MS preface to Literary America, already quoted in the volume of Poe's Poems, page 489 entry 21. Vincent Priessnitz, an Austrian, sought to cure almost all ills of the flesh by Hydropathy, the liberal use of cold water.