Across the UK people celebrated all things literature on World Book Day. But for someone in Haslemere, every day is about to be book day.

Cherrimans, a seven bedroom home built in the 1600s, has just gone under offer for £1.65million – a small price to live where history was made. In 1871, Marian Evans, better known by her pen-name George Eliot, was writing Middlemarch. She and her partner George Lewes were living in Haslemere and stayed at this house while she wrote her masterpiece.

Cherrimans: Home where George Eliot wrote Middlemarch (Picture by Hamptons)
Cherrimans: Home where George Eliot wrote Middlemarch (Credit: Hamptons) (Hamptons)

In a letter, Eliot said of her stay at Cherrimans: “We enjoy our roomy house and pretty lawn greatly. Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a verandah, with flower beds and lawn and pretty hills in sight, my feet on a warm water bottle, and my writing on my knees. We dine at two; and at four, when the tea comes in, I begin to read aloud. About six or half-past we walk on the commons and see the great sky over our head. We fill our evening with physics, chemistry, or other wisdom if our heads are at par; if not we take to folly, in the shape of Alfred de Musset’s poems, or something akin to them. “

When Rebecca Mead was researching her book The Road to Middlemarch, she said: “This must be the most vivid picture Eliot ever gave of herself in the act of creativity, and the least anguished. She sounds contented, comfortable and self-aware.”