The Oval Portrait

Summary

This is Edgar Allen Poe's shortest short story. Still, it is one of his most relevant works. It is a tale about an oval portrait hanging in a chateau that has a horrifying history. The painting is surrounded by mistery. After all, one can only wonder about what happened to the young girl depicted in the beautiful, yet haunting, painting. The Oval Portrait may present a brief text, but it is powerful enough to have inspired many authors, including Oscar Wilde and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

“On the face of it, The Oval Portrait is a moral, even a cautionary, fable about the tragic and dehumanizing effects of artistic obsession,” according to William Freedman, professor of English Literature at the University of Haifa.

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, and literary critic. Poe is well known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. He was one of the America's earliest writers of short stories, and many consider him to be the inventor of the detective fiction.

Pete Cross is the winner of the Young Adult Audie Award 2022 for his narration of Ryan La Sala’s Be Dazzled.