“ George Meredith has analysed and described her extraordinary success as a hostess, and the process by which she reduced too ardent admirers to “happy crust-munching devotees.” “In England, in her day,” he says, “while health was with her, there was one house where men and women conversed. When that house perforce was closed, a light had gone out in our country.” After her father’s death, she fell into weak health and was obliged to seek sunnier climes. She went in 1860 to the Cape of Good Hope, and later to Egypt, where she died on the 14th of July 1869. ”

“ The poet and the little girl became fast friends, and years afterwards she contributed to Lord Houghton’s Monographs Personal and Social a touching account of a renewal of their friendship when Heine lay dying in Paris. Her parents went to Malta in 1836, and Lucie Austin was left in England at school, but her unconventional education made the restrictions of a girls’ school exceedingly irksome. ”