Mary Frances Billington established her reputation as a journalist by holding a number of prominent posts on English newspapers and reporting on major social concerns and events, roles that were typically unavailable to women at the turn of the twentieth century. Her ethnographic study of women's lives in
India,
Woman in India, 1895, critiques Western preconceptions about Indian women's everyday lives and struggles. She devoted much of her later life to furthering the status of women journalists and serving in an important editorial capacity for the
Daily Telegraph. Her two collections of writing published during the First World War offer some of the period's most comprehensive accounts of women's contributions to the war effort.
Milestones
30 November 1894 MFB published
Woman in India, a collection of twenty-eight articles which had initially appeared in the
Daily Graphic, the fruit of her research on the subcontinent. The title-page was dated 1895.

1915 MFB published her final work, a second collection of articles on women and their role in the First World War,
The Roll-Call of Serving Women: A Record of Woman's Work for Combatants and Sufferers in the Great War.

27 August 1925 MFB died at her home in
London of unspecified causes at the age of sixty-three.
