This is another of Poe's peculiar bifurcated tales. It starts out with an unnamed narrator, who, for undisclosed reasons, is traveling with one servant in the Appenines Mountains. The man has had an unexplained "affray with the banditti," which has left him with a painful but apparently not dangerous wound. The duo take refuge in an uninhabited chateau, whose owners never show up, and while the narrator is taking opium for his pain, he becomes interested in the "oval portrait" of a beautiful young woman.
He becomes so taken with the portrait that he digs through a convenient family history to find out who she was. In a touch reminiscent of Hawthorne, it's revealed that when the woman had her portrait painted by her beloved, he made it so lifelike that the life departed from the body of the model.
Nothing overtly fantastic takes place, but the narrative qualifies as uncanny because the pay-off is communicated through the venue of the internal story, which may or may not be a true representation of events. The story doesn't even bother coming back to the narrator's concerns once the history of the doomed woman is told. The story was adapted into a godawful ghost-story flick, reviewed here.
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