 At the time of the publication of this very short tale, his wife Virginia had just begun to show signs of illness, though she would not die for another five years.The narrator, then, is Poe himself, living with his young cousin (soon-to-be wife) and his aunt.The abrupt ending, with the narrator's new love only named in the third to last paragraph, is somewhat unconvincing if this is Poe's attempt at justifying his own feelings.