Summary

The narrator begins by saying that he cannot remember when he first met Ligeia, and he knows nothing of her family except that it is old. Ligeia herself, once his wife, he can remember in every detail, and he relates their story.

Ligeia is tall and slender, ethereal as a shadow. Her face is faultless in its beauty, her skin like ivory, her features classic. Crowning the perfect face and body is raven-black, luxuriant hair. Her eyes, above all else, hold the key to Ligeia’s mystery. Larger than most, those black eyes hold an expression unfathomable even to her husband. It becomes his all-consuming passion to unravel the secret of that expression.

In character, Ligeia possesses a stern will that never fails to astound him. Outwardly she is placid and calm, but she habitually utters words that stun him with their intensity. Her learning is immense. She speaks many languages, and in metaphysical investigations she is never wrong. Her husband is engrossed in a study of metaphysics, but it is she who guides him and unravels the secrets of his research. With Ligeia to assist him, he knows that he will one day reach a goal of wisdom undreamed of by others.

Then Ligeia falls ill. Her skin becomes transparent and waxen, her eyes wild, and he knows that she will die. The passion of her struggle against death is frightening. He has always known that she loves him, but in those last days she abandons herself completely to love. On what is to be the last day of her life, she bids him repeat to her a poem she had composed not long before. It is a morbid thing about death, about the conquering of Man by the Worm. As he finishes repeating the melancholy lines, Ligeia leaps to her feet with a shriek, then falls back on her deathbed. In a scarcely audible whisper, she repeats a proverb that has haunted her: that human beings do not yield to death save through the weakness of their own will. So Ligeia dies.

Crushed with sorrow, her husband leaves his desolate home by the Rhine and retires to an old and decayed abbey in a deserted region in England. He leaves the exterior of the building in its sagging state, but inside he furnishes the rooms lavishly and strangely. He has become the slave of opium, and the furnishings take on the shapes and colors of his fantastic dreams. One bedchamber receives the most bizarre treatment of all, and it is to this chamber that he leads his new bride, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.

The room, in a high turret of the abbey, is of immense proportions. It is lighted by a single huge window, the pane of which has a leaden hue, giving a ghastly luster to all objects within. The walls, floors, and furniture are all covered with a heavy, arabesque tapestry showing black figures on pure gold. The figures change as one looks at them from different angles, their appearance being altered by an artificial current of air that constantly stirs the draperies.

In rooms such as this, the narrator spends a bridal month with Lady Rowena. It is easy to perceive that she loves him but little, and he hates her with a passion more demoniac than human. In his opium dreams, he calls aloud for Ligeia, as if he could restore her to the earthly life she has abandoned. He revels in memories of her purity and her love.

In the second month of their marriage, Rowena grows ill, and in her fever she speaks of sounds and movements in the bedchamber, fantasies unheard and unseen by her husband. Although she recovers, she has recurring attacks of the fever, and it becomes evident...