Day was born in Cork, Ireland, on 24 April 1876 to Robert and Rebecca Day. Her father
Robert ran a Saddler and Ironmonger business and was a well known antiquarian and photographer. In 1910, she formed the local
Irish Women's Franchise League branch in Cork as an activist group for women's suffrage. The following year she left that group and founded the non-militant Munster Women's Franchise League. Her new interest in politics led to her winning the election of
poor-law guardians the same year. Her later writings reveal that she saw the Cork workhouses as an expensive self-perpetuating evil run by amateurs. This led to her first novel. From 1913 to 1917, she wrote three plays for the
Abbey Theatre in collaboration with
Geraldine Cummins, the most successful of which was the comedy
Fox and Geese (1917). The
Battle of Verdun lasted most of 1916 and during that time Day was among a group from the
Society of Friends who cared for the wounded. She was in France for fifteen months and she used the experience to create her 1918 book
Round about Bar-le-Duc.
Where the Mistral Blows was published in 1933 and describes her time in Provence in France. but she died in Cromer and District Hospital on 26 May 1964. ==Criticism==