My Friend Annabel Lee

In this strange and tantalizing dialogue, Mary MacLane speaks with someone named Annabel Lee - but who, exactly, is she? A marble statue in the park that somehow knows MacLane's deepest vulnerabilities? An imaginary companion who returns her letters? A flesh-and-blood friend whose identity must remain hidden? The reader is never told, and perhaps MacLane herself never knew. What unfolds is a series of conversations that drift between the whimsical and the profound: gossip from the neighborhood, philosophical musings on meaning and mortality, and the tender intimacies of a friendship that refuses to be categorized. Written with MacLane's characteristic raw honesty and feminist defiance, this 1903 work plays with the boundaries between reality and invention, between the self and its others. It is a book about the hunger to be known - and the delightful uncertainty of who, exactly, is doing the knowing.