Although she had a long-lasting love-affair with a man (musicologist Percy Buck ) and shared affectionate, long-term, non-sexual relationships with men (for example with David Garnett ), her thirty-nine-year lesbian relationship with Valentine Ackland (which lasted till Ackland's death) was the most enduring and influential one in her life.

Her mother, born Mary Bailey , was the daughter of a widow who had successfully made herself a wage-earner to support a family of ten children. Mary married for love, having met her future husband after each had emigrated to Australia, and when left a widow herself with two daughters to support she proved capable of emulating the resourcefulness of her mother. During her husband's last illness she rode full tilt against Victorian-Australian convention by going to work, as a rural postmistress, a function she exercised in several small towns one after the other.Michael Ackland believes that HHR distorted the picture of her mother in her writings—by, for instance, ascribing her musical talent to inheritance from her father alone. Mary Richardson died in late November 1896, less than a year after Ettie's marriage.

Making their first appearance in print are poems written for Valentine Ackland and for Nina Hamnett , and NC 's elegy for Eliot , written a few weeks after his death and only two months before her own, which takes the form of a letter to John Hayward . It dwells on The Waste Land, with only passing mention of his later poetry.Carol Rumens chose a sonnet, In the Studio, 1923, from this volume as The Guardian's Poem of the Week in February 2017.

During the 1920s EM also wrote a wide variety of short fiction, which was published in such periodicals as the News Chronicle, Grand Magazine, Nash's Magazine, and Everyman. Her first volume of stories, Green Figs, appeared by July 1931 and was followed in 1935 by The Falconer's Voice, which collects one novella with several short stories, most of them unpublished.

Chapters are headed with a lavish array of quotations. Among the better-known authors are Ariosto (in the original), Shakespeare , Drayton , Milton , Pope (on the title-page), Young , Gray , Collins , Johnson , Savage , Goldsmith , Cowper , Burns , Beattie , and Barbauld . The novel, told in the form of omniscient narrative, opens, Maria Villars was born a beauty. This beauty is rich, too, and spoiled. In the next generation Maria undertakes to teach her daughter Ellen Mordaunt (who is neither a beauty nor a prodigy) herself. Consciousness of her shortcomings as a teacher makes her hope Ellen will turn out badly and therefore attract all the blame. Fortunately, however, Ellen's education, moral more than academic, is taken over by the local clergyman and his wife, to good effect. Ellen marries, to please her family, Sir William Ackland, the cousin who is the family heir, and meets much suffering (even poverty and prison) because he cannot be satisfied with the rational, unsentimental love she offers him. A happy ending, heavily moralised and didactic, gives her as second husband the man she loved in the first place, of whom Sir William had been unreasonably jealous. Whereas her first husband wanted her money, her second shares the inheritance among the siblings and proposes to earn his living (as a lawyer).

During the Second World War she signed up to nurse in a new organisation, the Emergency Medical Service , for which she received a regular state salary. She returned to the Radcliffe Infirmary to work in its newly created neurosurgical Nuffield Ward , later nursed private patients at the London Clinic , then went to work at the Ackland Nursing Home in Oxford. Her nursing career ended six months after VE Day, when service personnel were demobilized.

MR opens her feminist volume on the way women have been valued for being decorative but despised as regards mind, and pays tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft . As examples of modern abuses she cites unequal marriages and the double standard of sexual conduct. She uses several real-life stories of women displaying a courage thought to be possible only for men. In one, a foreign lady chooses the masculine mode of vindicating her honour in a duel when her fiancé threatens that honour by asking for sex before the wedding. Having shot dead the man she loves and had intended to marry, she dies shortly afterwards in a convent. (MR observes that in England she would have been shut up as a lunatic.) In another anecdote, Lady Harriet Acland goes undauntedly through the Ticonderoga campaign of 1776.

With hindsight, this conflict looks like a dress rehearsal for World War Two. Other nations joined in, Germans, Italians, and Russians seizing the opportunity to test newly developed military aircraft and air units under battle conditions in Spain. Idealistic young Britons rushed to fight in the republican cause; writers commenting on the struggle included George Orwell , Naomi Mitchison , Nancy Cunard , Valentine Ackland , Sylvia Townsend Warner , W. H. Auden , and Rose Macaulay . The British government recognised Franco's government on 28 February 1939.