ABSTRACT
In the early thirties came the transition in Virginia from the essay-sketch that had prevailed since the appearance of The British Spy, to the full blown romance of love and adventure. Dr. William Alexander Caruthers was a Virginia liberal of the older school, before the renaissance of the slave cause transferred southern leadership to the South Carolina group, and he shared none of Tucker's partisanship for Calhoun. John Pendleton Kennedy might turn to the past for the figures and scenes of his stories, but he discovered in the activities of the present materials for romance quite as fascinating. But unfortunately his economic romanticism gradually undermined his literary romanticism; he outgrew his earlier literary ambitions, and the romances of his later life never got written. It is from this slovenly background of aristocratic Virginia, with its liberalisms and conservatisms running at cross purposes, that the enigmatical figure of Edgar Allan Poe emerged to vex the northern critics.
