[1] The couple married on 23 May 1837 but were unable to take a honeymoon, as William's eldest daughter Mary was ill. She died in June and was buried in the London burial ground of Bunhill Fields, next to her mother.

[3] William Ellis had started to become a successful writer on the topography, history, botany, and ethnography of Polynesia, since returning from the South Seas.

Elizabeth Sandford wrote for women in support of this view,[5] whilst others such as Susanna Corder ran a novel Quaker girls' school at Abney Park, instituted by the philanthropist William Allen, which dissented from convention by teaching all the latest sciences as early as the 1820s.

Understandably, historians have focused on Ellis's education of these women in domestic duties, along with appropriate submission to their husbands: in the famous phrase, to "suffer and be still."

[10] Her book The Beautiful in Nature and Art was reissued in an 8-volume series of works in nineteenth-century British aesthetics edited by John Vladimir Price.

Being of independent mind, she was buried in the countryside near their home, whilst her husband was laid to rest in the Congregationalists' non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery on the outskirts of Victorian London.