for Hurst and Blackett and for Bentley, recommending, for example, that the latter publish Ellen Wood's best-selling East Lynne (1861), although turning down such later successful authors as M. E. Braddon and Ouida. She often used her place with Bentley to boost the careers of other female writers, including friends like Margaret Oliphant and Frances Power Cobbe. Friends and romances Jewsbury was highly sociable, with many friends and literary partnerships, and able to find common ground with people of any class. Her growing prominence and unconventional personality, smoking and wearing men's clothes like George Sand, soon brought her a high profile in literary society. Her friends included the Huxley, Kingsley, Rossetti, and Browning families, W. E. Forster (with whom she visited revolutionary Paris in 1848), John Bright, John Ruskin and G. H. Lewes. She never married, but had close personal relationships with men and women, some carnal, some platonic, the most significant being with Jane Carlyle. Another was with the actress Charlotte Cushman, a powerful, notably mannish figure, whom she admired for her wide experience of life, which contrasted with Jane's dutiful domesticity. (Jane Carlyle became jealous and upset about the relationship.) Cushman was the model for Bianca in The Half Sisters. Sydney Owenson, also known as Lady Morgan, had helped Jewsbury when she first arrived in London, and Jewsbury provided much unconditional friendship, eventually helping her to write her memoirs in old age. Of her male companions, the most significant was a government official in New Zealand, Walter Mantell, eight years her junior, who felt uneasy about his task of pressuring the Maoris to sell their land cheaply to the British, and returned to live in England. She made great efforts to promote him in the literary world, and even proposed marriage, but it seems that he began to sicken of her attentions and they drifted apart. Death Jewsbury moved to Sevenoaks, Kent, after the death of Jane Carlyle in 1866. She herself contracted cancer in 1879, died in a private London hospital in 1880, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery. She was writing until the end of her life, her last report for Bentley being dated 9 September 1880. She left all her papers to the businessman and feminist John Stores Smith, with whom she had had a strong relationship. References Attributions Retrieved 22 June 2011 External links Geraldine Jewsbury's review of George Eliot's The Mill on the