Mrs. Lewes was an enthusiastic lover of art, and especially of music.  She never tired in her interest in beholding fine paintings, and music was the continual delight of her life.  She was a tireless frequenter of picture galleries, and every fine musical entertainment in London was sure to find her, in company with Mr. Lewes, an enthusiastic listener.  Good acting also claimed not a little of her interest, and she carefully studied even the details of the dramatic art, so that she was able to give a critical appreciation to the acting she enjoyed.  Indeed, she had given to her mind that rounded fulness of attainment, and developed all her faculties with that due proportion, which Fichte so earnestly preached as the characteristic of true culture.  “Her character,” says Edith Simcox, “seemed to include every possibility of action and emotion; no human passion was wanting in her nature, there were no blanks or negations; and the marvellous thing was to see how, in this wealth of impulses and desires, there was no crash of internal discord, no painful collisions with other human interests outside; how, in all her life, passions of volcanic strength were harnessed in the service of those nearest her, and so inspired by the permanent instinct of devotion to her kind, that it seemed as if it were by her own choice they spent themselves there only where their force was welcome.  Her very being was a protest against the opposing and yet cognate heresies that half the normal human passions must be strangled in the quest of virtue, and that the attainment of virtue is a dull and undesirable end, seeing that it implies the sacrifice of most that makes life interesting.”  She had her own temptations and her imperfections.  With these she struggled bravely, and set herself to the hard task of correction and discipline.  Her culture was not merely one of books, but it was also one of moral discipline and of strenuous spiritual subjection.  It was one of stern moral requirements and duties, as well as one of large sympathy with all that is natural and beautiful.

It was a quiet life of continuous study and authorship which Mrs. Lewes led in The Priory, and it was varied from year to year only by her visits to the continent and by her summer residence in Surrey.  One of her summer retreats, at the village of Shotter Mill, has been described, as well as her life there.  The most picturesque house in the place is known as Brookbank, and here she spent a summer, that of 1871.  It is described as “an old two-storied cottage, the front of the house being half-covered with trailing rose-trees.  The rooms are low but pleasant, and furnished in a simple, comfortable manner.  We have often endeavored,” says the writer of this account, “to glean some information regarding George Eliot’s life at Shotter Mill, but she and Mr. Lewes lived in such seclusion that there was very little to be told.  They seldom crossed their threshold during the day, but wandered over the commons