Publisher's Synopsis
What is something more than love? It's complicated. While teaching at a Canadian university, ex-pat American English professor Sean O'Hara stumbles on the diary of his great-great-great-grandmother, Bridget Ryan. With a doctorate in English literature based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Sean is deeply drawn into Bridget's story when he discovers that she and Poe were contemporaries, friends and perhaps...something more?When the diary begins in 1825, 16-year-old Bridget's one passionate desire is to follow her widowed father's footsteps into medicine. The medical school, however, has never admitted a woman and has no intention of changing that policy for Bridget. Thus, Bridget is faced with discovering another path for her life, a path that leads her to her life's work with impoverished women in early-twentieth-century Baltimore and an abiding link to Edgar Poe. Bridget's story sweeps us into her life in Boston and Baltimore, as we begin to unravel the mystery that, to this day, continues to surround the final few days of Poe's life. Haunted by a medical journal article titled "The Life and Addictions of Edgar Allan Poe" author Patricia J. Parsons conjures a story of what might have been. Rich in carefully researched historical detail, this book is one answer to what really might have happened to Poe in those last, lost days of his life - and the identity of the mysterious stranger who, even now, places three roses and a bottle of cognac on Poe's grave every year in the wee hours of the morning on January 19, his birthday.
