Her father, a physician and classical scholar, and her mother included her in their social life and conversations with prominent citizens and intellectuals.

She stayed two years and started a lifetime of publication with a translation of Johann David Passavant's essay on English art.

There Eastlake's literary career brought entry to an intellectual social circle including prominent figures such as Lord Jeffrey, John Murray and David Octavius Hill.

[2] Despite a diary entry in 1846 saying there were many "compensations" for unmarried women, three years later, at the age of 40, she married the artist, art historian and critic Sir Charles Lock Eastlake.

She joined him in an active working and social life, entertaining artists such as Landseer and mixing with a wide range of well-known people, including Lord Macaulay, Anna Jameson and Ada Lovelace.

[6] She disputed the morality of the novel, writing that ‘the popularity of Jane Eyre is a proof how deeply the love for illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature’ and summarising with ‘It is a very remarkable book: we have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such horrid taste’.

The History of Our Lord, 1864, her completion of the last two volumes of the Sacred and Legendary Art book series by her late friend Anna Jameson.

Amongst her other writings are pieces on Madame de Stael, Anna Jameson, the Royal Female School of Art, Kaspar Hauser, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, and Dürer.

[18] More critically, Janice Schroeder decries her values supporting women's subordinate place in the class structure within British imperialism.