of his first wife. There was a second edition of her mixed volume of verse and prose, Solitary Hours (1826), in that year. The marriage caused dismay among Southey's grown-up children, except for his eldest daughter Edith. Within three months of the marriage, Southey began to succumb to senile dementia. He died in March 1843. The wrangles spilled over into gossip, and lost Caroline Southey the support of Wordsworth, for example. Caroline Southey had to leave Southey's home, Greta Hall, immediately after his death, and move back to Buckland Cottage, where she ceased to write. Her marriage had lost her the Bruce annuity, but she was awarded a civil list pension of £200 in 1852. She died at home on 20 July 1854. Satire and protest Writing about Ellen Fitzarthur, Southey said, "You have the eye, the ear, and the heart of a poetess..." (Dowden, p. 10). Alfred H. Miles in the first decade of the last century noted that her work was neglected: it "had a greater charm for her own generation than it can ever have again. There is a natural simplicity about it which gives it a certain affinity with the so-called 'Lake school', and which was much newer in her day than it is in ours. And yet... her work still emits a sweet mild fragrance, and recalls a tender, sympathetic personality." Her published output of five books of verse, two books of prose tales and one miscellany of mixed prose and verse has been described by the present-day scholar Anne Zanzucchi as the work of "an experimental and dexterous writer whose publications represent a range of forms: prose fiction (Chapters on Churchyards), verse satire (The Cat's Tail), dramatic monologue (Tales of the Factories), and blank verse autobiography (The Birth-day)." The last was the work in which she broke her anonymity in 1836. Virginia H. Blain in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that her "Tales of the Factories were among the earliest of that kind of protest poetry, preceding both Caroline Norton's and Elizabeth Barrett's works in the genre." The romance of Southey and Bowles was the subject of a BBC drama, The Fly and the Eagle. Caroline Southey's poem To Death was composed as a song by Grace Williams in 1953. Works Ellen Fitzarthur : A Metrical Tale, in Five Cantos, London 1820 (Google Books) The Widow's Tale: and Other Poems, London 1822