Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Weiss, Susan Archer Talley

WEISS, Susan Archer Talley, poet, b. in Hanover county, Va., 14 Feb., 1835. Her father, Thomas Talley, a lawyer, removed in 1842 to Richmond, where she went to school for one year. At the age of eleven she became deaf, and afterward educated herself. During the civil war she was accused by the National authorities of being a spy, and was arrested and imprisoned at Fort McHenry, Baltimore. While there in 1863 she married Col. von Weiss, a German officer, who died in 1869. She has thrown new and favorable light on Poe's domestic character in a paper published in “Scribner's Monthly” in March, 1876.