After completing her education, she became a missionary in the service of the
United Presbyterian Church of North America. While assigned to the
Punjab region of India, she worked at a girls' school and at a hospital. She returned to the U.S. in 1910 because of illness and resigned from her position as a missionary in 1916. She spent the year 1912-13 at the
divinity school of the University of Chicago. Then she taught for five years at
West Pullman High School. Throughout these years she cared for her invalid father and published her short stories in a variety of magazines, including the
Atlantic Monthly. The themes found throughout her writings include the secondary status of women and the role of religion. When she won a $2,000 prize offered by Harper & Brothers in 1923, her name was unknown because she had signed her short stories in ''
Harper's Magazine "An Elderly Spinster." Her work is of interest in part for its exploration of feminist issues in a domestic context set against a background of an unsympathetic judicial system. He later served as warden of Dartmoor Prison. Penal reform inspired her non-fiction study The Crime of Punishment
(1931) and two novels, The Dark Duty
(1931) and The Valiant Wife'' (1933), both "melodramatic romances...constructed around the philosophical and dramatic problems of prison administration and reform." ==Works==