RH was appointed a member of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research , to which she had already given two lectures.

Although EMH at one point considered becoming a missionary, she decided against it. For some time she assisted her brother in the observatory, using the telescope and charting the moon's movements. William Rowan Hamilton encouraged her to assist him in his scientific studies, but eventually she decided to focus on her poetry. She did not, however, attempt to make any income with her writing.

EH worked for many years before her marriage as a servant in a family named Huddesford, who lived at Allesley near Coventry, not far from where she had grown up.

After leaving school IH occupied herself with running her father's household, but when she reached her thirties he encouraged her to take up a career.

A month after his sixteenth birthday, TH was apprenticed to an architect, John Hicks , in Dorchester. For this Hicks charged only forty pounds, instead of the usual hundred.

As her husband's absences in London increased, BLH became an efficient steward of the estate, dealing with tenants and rents as well as with the education of her children. As to the latter, she found a resident schoolmaster or tutor for her sons, and translated Latin texts to help in their religious (that is, their emphatically Protestant) education.

For years she had run a circulating library at Tynemouth.

She became amanuensis or secretary for her father , with only a token wage. But she received £40 for copying and proof-reading his biography of Johnson . She states satirically that her father would share his deliberations on Johnson's papers with her because she was of a very proper age to be of his privy council, being ten years old!

He studied as a painter, a career in which he had some success, as well as beginning to write and publish on philosophical and theoretical subjects. He became a parliamentary reporter, as well as a critic of theatre and literature.

She too taught at her husband's school at Brentford, and after his death she took on his place as its head. The literary historian Montague Summers called her an ardent educationalist. She too began publishing, at first as a translator (mostly of works about travel and exploration), and moved on to fiction and advice on conduct.

It was apparently shortly before her husband's death that she began writing in an effort to produce some income.

In addition to writing Isabel occasionally resorted to translating French works. Her brother, the tireless promoter, believed it must have cost one gifted with such original powers, some heart burnings to find that, instead of deriving profit from her own thoughts, and independence by her genius—Necessity urged her to accept such inferior employment as translation.

SH ran adventure playgrounds, an Adult Education Centre creche, and a children's rights workshop. She worked for the National Childbirth Trust , and also spent some time working in bookshops. In 1991, she held a Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia , and another in 2003-2004 at the University of Exeter . She has been a teacher of creative writing at Exeter Arts Centre in Devon, and she teaches courses for the Poetry School and the Poetry Library . Helen Armstrong has edited a book entitled Sean's House: Poems by Writers from Selima Hill's Exeter Writing Groups, 1996. SH has also worked with artists on multimedia projects for the Royal Ballet , the Welsh National Opera , and BBC Bristol . She was one of the judges for the National Poetry Competition for 2002.

Her religious observance, both public and private, was a central thread in her life. Her writing was closely linked with reading the Bible and other devotional works, and overseeing the religious teaching and development of her servants. Her medical ministrations to the local populace included not only dressing wounds and sores and offering herbal remedies, but also performing impromptu and generally unsuccessful surgery. She supplied training and education to young people of her own class (mostly girls) who lived temporarily in her household, as Lady Huntingdon had done for her.

Working as a stable-boy, being entrusted with the management of one of that race of creatures that were the most admired and beloved by me, seemed too good to be true. Though it was an exhausting life, TH was happy to be warm, fed, clothed, proud of his work, and eager for games with the other boys. He later worked as a cobbler (for his father), as a teacher of reading (from 1764), as a household secretary to Granville Sharp , and as an actor. This last in his series of odd jobs decided the shape of his future career. After some years as a touring actor, he secured work in London and began to write small theatrical pieces which did well on stage. In 1777 he published a volume of poems, and soon moved on to essays, fiction, journalism, and translation. By the late 1780s he was a successful dramatist and man of letters, and soon afterwards a novelist.Mary Russell Mitford wrote that no other translator of his time could equally produce the zest and savor of original writing.

EH became a Quaker minister about 1649, and preached widely during the 1650s. She was the first person in England to preach the doctrines of George Fox. In jail she acted as archivist to the group imprisoned with her, not only writing letters herself but keeping copies, and keeping copies of letters written by others. The earliest Quaker letters that survive are from summer 1652, the time that EH was making copies.

During her time in Lahore, Adela Cory worked in some capacity with her father on the Civil and Military Gazette.

GMH was appointed to a junior Chair of Classics at University College , Dublin; the job took him away from the squalid conditions he had sometimes been preaching in but it did nothing to relieve his unhappiness.

Before September 1651, when the royalist cause was decisively crushed at the battle of Worcester, SH collaborated with the Earl (later Duke) of Lauderdale and Richard Hopton (whom she was later to marry) in supporting the work of royalist agents. Lauderdale, a Scottish leader who had backed the parliament against the king but was now working to reconcile the future Charles II with the Scots Covenanters, was also deeply versed in history and theology.

Educated at Sandhurst , RHH started writing and editing in his thirties after a spell in the Mexican navy. His verse was praised by Thomas Carlyle and Edgar Allan Poe . He also adapted plays and contributed articles to periodicals, including Household Words. He collaborated with longtime correspondent Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning) on A New Spirit of the Age (1844), and later published two volumes of their letters.

AEH , who had been working as a clerk at the Patent Office and pursuing his scholarly interests in his own time at the British Museum , was offered a Chair in Latin at University College, London .

AMH was already writing and drawing as a professional when Henry Chorley , editor of the Ladies' Companion, commissioned her to go to Oberammergau and report on the passion play. On her return to England she continued to carry out writing commissions, as well as becoming a kind of editorial assistant to her parents: she saw a book of her father's through the press and arranged US editions, through James T. Fields of Boston, of all the Howitts' works that were in print. She returned to performing this service for them when they were living abroad at the end of their lives. For some years during the 1850s she worked seriously as a painter; she exhibited once at the Royal Academy , and attracted a good deal of favourable notice before she gave up painting, apparently as a result of harsh criticism from Ruskin . She also threw herself into good works, helping to educate the children of the poor and to run a soup kitchen.