Along with Walter Langley, Edwin Harris founded the Newlyn colony of artists. Harris had enrolled with John Wainwright at the Verlat’s Royal Academy of Antwerp in 1880. In Antwerp, Harris was greatly influenced by Charles Verlat, the Academy's Professor of Painting, who advocated a realist approach and working directly from nature, en plein-air. Keen to apply the skills he’d learned in Antwerp, Harris first travelled to Newlyn in 1881 and then onto Brittany, sponsored by the dealer Edwin Chamberlain, for two successive summers in 1881 and 1882. Harris settled in Cornwall in 1883 with his new wife Sarah Chamberlain (niece of his dealer). After a short stint in the nearby village of Paul, in 1884 the Harrises moved into Cliff Castle Cottage in Newlyn.

Miles away (c. 1885) is painted on the Mousehole shoreline (below the village of Paul) looking back along the coast towards Newlyn. It is a stretch of coast the artist would have known very well. The model is one of Harris's favourites, Betsy Lanyon, unusually in this instance in an outdoor scene which would have been painted, or at least commenced, en plein air. The painting is also an example of square brush technique much employed by Harris and his contemporaries such as Frank Bramley. Betsy is sitting on a basket which may have used for collecting mussells along the shoreline but as the title suggests, in her moment of rest, her thoughts are far away. Far-away thoughts was a narrative that Harris and other Newlyn artists returned to many times and one which would have been appreciated by the Victorian audience as a means of speaking of the perils facing the Newlyn fishing fleet, or simply of the distant memories of its older inhabitants. The work has a wonderful brightness and clarity and is presented in a sensitively conserved 1880s gilt frame which contrasts and emphasies the grey blues of Betsy's dress and shawl.