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.
He thinks he remembers meeting her "in some large, old decaying city near the Rhine."
He is unable to recall anything about the history of Ligeia, including her family's name, but remembers her beautiful appearance. Her beauty, however, is not conventional. He describes her as emaciated, with some "strangeness". He describes her face in detail, from her "faultless" forehead to the "divine orbs" of her eyes.
They marry, and Ligeia impresses her husband with her immense knowledge of physical and mathematical science, and her proficiency in classical languages. She begins to show her husband her knowledge of metaphysical and "forbidden" wisdom.
After an unspecified length of time Ligeia becomes ill, struggles internally with human mortality, and ultimately dies. The narrator, grief-stricken, buys and refurbishes an abbey in England.
He soon enters into a loveless marriage with "the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine".
In the second month of the marriage, Rowena begins to suffer from worsening anxiety and fever.
One night, when she is about to faint, the narrator pours her a goblet of wine. Drugged with opium, he sees (or thinks he sees) drops of "a brilliant and ruby colored fluid" fall into the goblet. Her condition rapidly worsens, and a few days later she dies and her body is wrapped for burial.
As the narrator keeps vigil overnight, he notices a brief return of color to Rowena's cheeks. She repeatedly shows signs of reviving, before relapsing into apparent death. As he attempts resuscitation, the revivals become progressively stronger, but the relapses more final. 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.
The narrator relies on Ligeia as if he were a child, looking on her with "child-like confidence". On her death, he is "a child groping benighted" with "childlike perversity".
despite this dependency on her, the narrator has a simultaneous desire to forget her, perhaps causing him to be unable to love Rowena. This desire to forget is exemplified in his inability to recall Ligeia's last name. The story tells us however that the narrator never knew her last name at all.
Ligeia, the narrator tells us, is extremely intelligent, "such as I have never known in a woman". Most importantly, she served as the narrator's teacher in "metaphysical investigation", passing on "wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!" So, her knowledge in mysticism, combined with an intense desire for life may have led to her revival.
Ligeia and Rowena serve as aesthetic opposites: Ligeia is raven-haired from a city by the Rhine while Rowena (believed to be named after the character in Ivanhoe) is a blonde Anglo-Saxon. This symbolic opposition implies the contrast between German and English romanticism.
Exactly what Poe was trying to depict in the metamorphosis scene has been debated, fueled in part by one of Poe's personal letters in which he denies that Ligeia was reborn in Rowena's body (a statement he later retracts).
If Rowena had actually transformed into the dead Ligeia, it is only evidenced in the words of the narrator, leaving room to question its validity. The narrator has already been established as an opium addict, making him an unreliable narrator.
The narrator early in the story describes Ligeia's beauty as "the radiance of an opium-dream". He also tells us that "in the excitement of my opium dreams, I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night... as if... I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned... upon the earth". This may be interpreted as evidence that Ligeia's return was nothing more than a drug-induced hallucination.
If Ligeia's return from death is literal, however, it seems to stem from her assertion that a person dies only by a weak will. This implies, then, that a strong will can keep someone alive. It is unclear, however, if it is Ligeia's will or her husband's will that brings Ligeia back from the dead. Her illness may have been consumption.
