The wife of Austrian incest father Josef Fritzl is seeking to divorce him after 52 years of marriage.

Austrian media say Rosemarie, 69, will divorce Josef, 74, after he stands trial for the ordeal her subjected his daughter to in the autumn.

Fritzl, 74, locked his daughter Elisabeth up in a secret cellar beneath his home in Amstetten, near Linz, 24 years ago and subjected her to brutal rapes throughout her incarceration.

Rosemarie Fritzl, left is to divorce her husband Josef after 52 years of marriage

She bore him seven incest children in his dungeon. She was freed in April this year when her firstborn daughter Kerstin, 19, hovered near death after falling ill in the cellar.

Rosemarie and Fritzl brought up three of the cellar children in their home. Fritzl concocted an elaborate story that his daughter had run away to join a sect and claimed the children were left on his doorstep because Elisabeth, now 42, could not cope with bringing them up.

Fritzl and his wife appeared to be happily married before the discovery of the secret cellar

Rosemarie joined Elisabeth and her children in a psychiatric clinic imediately after her husband was arrested but a rift has since opened up with her daughter.

Elisabeth is angry that the three children Rosemarie brought up call her mother instead of grandmother.

She is said to find it hard to understand why her mother stayed with her father even though he was a convicted rapist who spent time in jail in the 1960’s.

And she is also having trouble accepting her mother did not know she was being abused when she was an 11-year-old schoolgirl, or that she did not try to do more to find her when Frtitzl said she had run away as a teenager.

Consequently, Rosemarie has moved out of the clinic and is living alone in a £270 a month rented flat in Linz.

She returned to the erstwhile family home at the weekend with a car and a trailer to load up personal possessions.

'I am doing OK,' she said to neighbours who met her outside the house.

Angry: Elisabeth Fritzl aged 15

Christoph Herbst, lawyer for Elisabeth and her children, confirmed that she has moved out. 'If you run away from your past you will forever be on the run,' he said.

Rosemarie cannot bring herself to live in the house again.

Police are mulling over plans to fill in the secret cellar with poured concrete so if the house is sold, it cannot be used or put on display as some sort of ghoulish attraction.

Recently Elisabeth finished several days of giving testimony via videolink to prosecutors and police about her ordeal; something which will spare her from attending the trial of the father she hates.

She spoke about the death of one of her children in the cellar shortly after he was born: evidence which might see Josef Fritzl accused of his murder or manslaughter because he did not get medical help for him.

Fritzl burned the corpse of the child in the solid wood fuel stove of the house.