of Edgar Allan Poe. He, too, praised her work, and often mentioned her favorably in his literary reviews. Brooks finished Zophiël in 1829, but did not publish it immediately. First, she took her son, Horace Brooks, to Hanover, New Hampshire, to try to enroll him at West Point. She was unsuccessful. However, in the same year, she visited Paris, and there met the Marquis de Lafayette, a man renowned for his heroic services in the American Revolutionary War. He was easily able to secure a position at West Point for Brooks's son, who went on to be modestly successful there. In 1831, she went to England and spent a few weeks at Southey's home. There, he oversaw the publishing of Zophiël in London. She then returned to the United States and lived in New England for approximately twelve years. In 1843, she serially published a "prose account of her unhappy love affair", called Idomen; or, the Vale of Yumuri, in a Boston newspaper. In December of the same year, she returned to her Cuban estate and published another poem, Ode to the Departed. She died in 1845, at age 51, of tropical fever. She had been working on a romance at the time, Beatriz, Beloved of Columbus, which was never published. She was buried in Limonar Church Cemetery in Matanzas, Cuba. References Bibliography Further reading J. D. Grove, "Legacy Profile: Maria Gowen Brooks (c.1795-1845)", Legacy, 12 (1995): 38-46 Dennis Low, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Ruth Shepard Graniss, An American Friend of Robert Southey (New York: [privately published], 1913). External links "Book of Tobit" 1794 births 1845 deaths American women poets 19th-century American poets 19th-century American women writers People from Medford, Massachusetts Poets from Massachusetts