She tried unsuccessfully to encourage her close friend Walter Mantell to start a new life as an author after his disagreement with the New Zealand government over Maori land rights.

Geraldine was educated at a boarding school kept by the Misses Darbys at Alder Mills near Tamworth, Staffordshire, and continued her studies in French, Italian and drawing in London in 1830–1831.

Invited to his home in Chelsea, London, she immediately began a warm friendship and correspondence with his wife Jane that would become the deepest relationship of her life.

Jewsbury was primarily a novelist of ideas and moral dilemmas, who sharply questioned the standard, idealised roles of wife and mother and promoted the spiritual value of work in a woman's life.

[7] Her first novel, Zoe: the History of Two Lives (1845), tells of a girl who falls in love with a Catholic priest, causing him to lapse from his faith.

As a novel of scepticism, it can be classed with the work of Charlotte Mary Yonge and Mrs Humphry Ward, while the linking of sexual feelings with spiritual anguish brought comparisons with George Sand.

The life of the conventional woman, Alice, compares unfavourably with that of her half-sister Bianca, who works as an actress to support an insane mother.

The character of Alice carries touches of Jane Carlyle, while Bianca is based clearly on another of Jewsbury's close friends, Charlotte Cushman.

Her third novel, Marian Withers (1851), explores the same theme of women's fulfilment, this time in an industrial setting, drawing on first-hand experience of the Manchester business world.

[12] He once wrote to her, "Dear Miss Jewsbury, – I make no apology for addressing you thus, for I am a reader of yours, and I hope that I have that knowledge of you which may justify a frank approach....

If I could induce you to write any papers or short stories for [Household Words] I should, I sincerely assure you, set great store by your help, and be much gratified in having it.

[11] She often used her place with Bentley to boost the careers of other female writers, including friends like Margaret Oliphant and Frances Power Cobbe.

Her growing prominence and unconventional personality, smoking and wearing men's clothes like George Sand, soon brought her a high profile in literary society.

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.