Georgina arrived at Sillwood House late in the evening on 16 November 1904. This was to be her base for the remaining years of her life, though she spent most of her time in London until 1912 when illness finally prevented her from travelling. The original intention seems to have been for her to rent a flat, but it was not long before she took over the whole house. Whilst she was away, Grace Ashford and her younger sister Annie acted as caretakers and housekeepers. Occasional lodgers helped to subsidise the household expenses.

Georgina travelled to Paris for the last time in mid May 1905, returning to Brighton two months later to prepare for a new round of legal actions. One evening she and Annie Ashford went to the theatre to see Ellen Terry in Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire, a comedy written especially for the actress by J.M. Barrie. Georgina was critical of her old friend, whom she had not seen for nearly twenty years: ‘Ellen charming, fascinating, but as she [has] grown so stout, and being so tall, she is ponderous, and the way her figure is strapped up is a marvel. It does not look natural. I would not do it. She blacks up her eyes too much.’ On the following day the two women spent two hours together and ‘jabbered our heads off’.

In the second week of October, Georgina sent nine cases and baskets and an armchair to the Salisbury Hotel, just off Fleet Street, where she had rented a room. It was only ten minutes’ walk from the Royal Courts of Justice, and very convenient. When the Courts reopened, she vowed that she would not go near ‘the beastly place’ – but she was there almost every day. She was soon involved in a convoluted series of claims against everyone who had had anything to do with the biography of Gounod published in the previous year. She also renewed her attacks on the booksellers and librarians, W.H. Smith. They had all, she claimed, contributed to holding her up to ‘hatred, ridicule and contempt’, and had forced her once again ‘into that litigation which has occasioned her to be contemptuously treated in Courts of Justice and elsewhere, and unjustly twitted and bantered and spoken of and “at” as though she were a low designing courtezan, a common scold, without either talent, birth, education or reputation’.