Morella

Morella is a gothic short story by Edgar Allan, first published in 1835.

The tale is narrated by a man who marries a woman named Morella, a brilliant and intense scholar immersed in mystical philosophy and theories of the immortal soul. At first fascinated by her mind, he gradually becomes deeply disturbed by her dark speculations about life, death, and the merging of identities, until his love turns into fearful revulsion.

As Morella’s health declines, she gives birth to a daughter and dies, yet her influence lingers. The child grows up uncannily similar to her mother in both appearance and intellect, and the narrator cannot bring himself to give her a name, haunted by the unsettling sense that the dead woman’s essence lives on in the girl...

"With a feeling of deep but most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul, from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never known—but the fires were not of Eros—and bitter and tormenting to my eager spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning, or regulate their vague intensity. "