She falls ill, composes "The Conqueror Worm", and quotes lines attributed to Joseph Glanvill (which suggest that life is sustainable only through willpower) shortly before dying.

The distraught narrator stays with her body overnight and watches as Rowena slowly comes back from the dead – though she has transformed into Ligeia.

The story is told by an unnamed narrator who describes the qualities of Ligeia: a beautiful, passionate and intellectual woman, raven-haired and dark-eyed.

They marry, and Ligeia impresses her husband with her immense knowledge of physical and mathematical science, and her proficiency in classical languages.

After an unspecified length of time Ligeia becomes ill, struggles internally with human mortality, and ultimately dies.

Shortly before her death, she composes a poem titled "The Conqueror Worm" which depicts her mental state and the resignation of her mortal being.

As dawn breaks, and the narrator is sitting emotionally exhausted from the night's struggle, the shrouded body revives once more, stands and walks into the middle of the room.

When he touches the figure, its head bandages fall away to reveal masses of raven hair and dark eyes: Rowena has transformed into Ligeia.

[2] Charles Eames of The New World commented: "The force and boldness of the conception and the high artistic skill, with which the writer's purpose is wrought out, are equally admirable".

[4] Critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw said, "The story of the Lady Ligeia is not merely one of the wonders of literature: it is unparalleled and unapproached".

Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman notes that, despite this dependency on her, the narrator has a simultaneous desire to forget her, perhaps causing him to be unable to love Rowena.

Most importantly, she served as the narrator's teacher in "metaphysical investigation", passing on "wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!"

[12] Professor Paul Lewis notes the close parallels between "Ligeia" and Ernst Raupach's "Wake Not the Dead" (1823), saying that the two tales deal with "almost identical material in radically different ways".

[13] Scholar Heide Crawford writes that Poe is likely to have borrowed, or to have been influenced by "Wake Not the Dead" as translated into English in Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) or Legends of Terror!

[21] Ligeia's theme of the death and resurrection of a beloved woman was subsequently developed by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo.

The story was adapted into the 2008 independent feature originally known by the title Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia but later renamed to The Tomb.