All About Esme

Esme Anne Platt Evenson Cullen
~Vampire~
Born: 1895
Changed to Vampire: 1921 - she was 26
Hometown: Columbus, Ohio
Hair color: Caramel
Eyes: Vampire gold/black
Height: 5’6”
Husband: Carlisle Cullen
Hobbies: Architecture and restoration
Changed by: Carlisle Cullen

In 1911, Esme broke her leg falling out of a tree she’d climbed. Her family lived on a farm on the outskirts of Columbus. The local doctor was away, and it was after dark by the time they got her to the small hospital in Columbus. A Dr. Cullen treated her. It was his last month in town. She never got over the experience.

Esme was the last of her friends to marry. She was thinking of moving West to be a schoolteacher, but her father didn’t think it was respectable for a lady to live alone in the wilds. The son of a family friend, a man with good prospects, wanted to marry her, and her father pressured her to accept. She was indifferent towards Charles Evenson, but not opposed to him. She married him in 1917 at the age of 22, and quickly found that this had been a bad decision. Charles’s public face was very different from his private face; he abused her. Her parents counseled her to be a good wife and keep quiet. When he was drafted to fight in WW1, it was a huge relief to her. When he came back in 1919, it was terrifying.

Shortly after his return, Esme discovered she was pregnant. The pregnancy was Esme’s catalyst to escape. She couldn’t let a child be brought into that home. She ran away in 1920 to live with a second cousin in Milwaukee, and then moved further north when word of her whereabouts leaked to her parents. She blended in easily, pretending to be one of the many war widows. She taught school in a small community outside Ashland. When her baby died in 1921 from a lung infection just a few days after he was born, she had nothing left. She had no idea that Carlisle was working in the little hospital in Ashland when she jumped off the cliff outside the town. Carlisle remembered her, of course, as the happy girl she had been at sixteen. He didn’t want her to die and so he saved her.

When she opened her eyes, in all that pain, and saw the face that she’d never forgotten in a decade, she was relieved. She was not really that upset to find out she was a vampire, but she didn’t take it as in stride as Emmett had. Still, she was happy to be with the man/vampire of her dreams. She did always have that maternal ache, and, as the physically oldest of the Cullen’s, she fell into a mothering role.

Source: Twilight Lexicon