George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880) ranks among the greatest English novelists. Living openly with the philosopher and journalist George Henry Lewes, whom she could not marry because his estranged wife refused a divorce, she became one half of Victorian London's most celebrated intellectual partnership.
Seeking rest, privacy and cleaner country air, they rented houses in Surrey, bringing trusted servants from London and withdrawing almost completely from society.
Eliot’s correspondence reveals how the landscape around Redhill and Earlswood restored both her health and her creativity.
In the summer of 1872, the couple rented Elversley, Park Road in Redhill, where Eliot wrote some chapters of the highly acclaimed Middlemarch.
As the weeks passed, she repeatedly wrote of the restorative effect of the countryside. On 4 June she told Barbara, Mme Eugene Bodichon,
‘We have been in our hiding place about twelve days now, and I am enjoying it more and more - getting more bodily ease and mental clearness than I have had for the last six months. Our house is not in the least beautiful, but it is well-situated and comfortable, perfectly still in the middle of a garden surrounded by fields and meadows, and yet within reach of shops and ‘civilization.’ We tell no one our address and have our letters sent on from the Priory.’
On 19 July in a letter to Maria, Mrs. Richard Congreve, she wrote of ‘the delicious sunshine as we wander over a hilly, half fern-clad, half grassy wilderness called South Park, from which we can overlook two fertile bosky valleys.’
Two years later she wrote ‘on the 1st of June we go into the country, to The Cottage, Earlswood Common, for four months.’ During this second summer retreat, she corrected proofs for The Legend of Jubal and worked closely on her final novel, Daniel Deronda. 
Although the exact site has never been identified, local historians generally place "The Cottage" on the edge of Earlswood Common near present-day Pendleton Road and St John's Church. It could have been the building marked ‘The Cottage’ close to Earlswood House and shown on the Ordnance Survey Map of 1872. The modest leased house has long since disappeared beneath twentieth-century housing.
On 14 June Eliot wrote to Mrs William Cross,
‘I feel sure you will like to know of our happiness in the secure peace of the country, and the good we already experience in soul and body from the sweet breezes over hill and common, the delicious silence, and the unbroken spaces of the day.
Just now the chill east wind has brought a little check to our pleasure in our long afternoon drives, and I could wish that Canon Kingsley and his fellow-worshippers of that harsh divinity could have it reserved entirely for themselves as a tribal god. But we live in hope that the kindlier air which we revelled in for the first week after our arrival will by and by return. Meanwhile I am wearing winter clothing in this middle of June.
The weather continued chilly and rainy and on 3 July she wrote to Mrs. Mark Pattison,
Mr. Lewes is gone to town on business this morning, and I am going to have a windy walk by myself. This Common, I suppose, was considered a bracing place for the idiots which may account for my being so well here.’
It was clearly a fairly poor summer as she wrote on 3 August to Mrs. Edward Burne-Jones,
‘Our common is a sort of ball-room for the winds, and on the warmest days we have had here we have found them at their music and dancing. They roar round the corners of our house in a wintry fashion while the sun is shining on the brown grass.
Eliot and Lewes went on frequent excursions to find a fixed summer residence and but having found one nearby they were put off by ‘a vile, threatening board set up in an adjoining piece of land - "To be let on building leases."’
Although they ultimately chose to purchase a permanent country house at Witley rather than settle in Earlswood, Eliot’s two Surrey summers proved remarkably productive. Here she completed portions of Middlemarch and began the work that would become Daniel Deronda. Her letters of this period preserve an affectionate portrait of the wooded commons and quiet lanes of nineteenth-century Redhill and Earlswood - landscapes that briefly became a refuge for one of England's greatest novelists.
The George Eliot Archive, The Complete Letters of George Elliot, George Eliot Archive.