Encouraged to write by her husband, she was a late representative of Poporanist traditionalism, which she infused with moral themes from Romanian Orthodoxy, and also with echos of modernist literature.

Her works of youth, coinciding with World War II, comprise mainly novels centered on the internal conflicts and moral triumphs of provincial women such as herself.

During the same interval, she was left a widow by her husband's death, which occurred at the height of communist pressures on the family; her brother in law Păstorel was imprisoned, as was her friend Dinu Pillat, while others in her circle fled Romania.

[2][6] According to her own account, he was instantly attracted to her dark complexion and "shiny black eyes", but also admired her literary attempts, and encouraged her to continue.

[7] She married Ionel in 1920,[3] with a ceremony attended by members of the Viața Românească literary circle, including doyen Garabet Ibrăileanu—who made a point of dancing, something he had never done in his earlier years.

[2] Her first published work appeared in 1929, hosted by Tudor Arghezi in Bilete de Papagal magazine; she also contributed to Revista Fundațiilor Regale and Familia.

[16] They also owned a house on Mihai Eminescu Street, Dorobanți, which Ionel reportedly received from the Federation of the Jewish Communities, for his services as a lawyer.

[10][14] It was followed in 1940 by Viața cea de toate zilele ("Everyday Life") and in 1943 by a lyrical sketch-story notebook, Cloșca cu pui ("Hen and Fledglings").

[3] In July 1939, modernist reviewer Eugen Lovinescu wrote that her "so very tender talent" stood apart from other feminine authors emerging at the time: she adhered to neither the "psychological eroticism" of Cella Serghi and Lucia Demetrius, nor to the "most incendiary sensuality" of Sorana Gurian.

[20] According to researcher Elena Panait, at both a character construction level and in terms of literary message, the works display Velisar's readings from Rabindranath Tagore, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev.

[2][21] Viața cea de toate zilele, written in the first person, shows the muted torment of Baba, a homemaker trapped in a provincial setting, and injured in an accident.

[22][23] This provincial and earthbound note has been read by scholar Aurel Martin as a regionalist ethos, showing Velisar's own cultural attachment to Western Moldavia.

[24] Rich in Christian symbols, down to the final scene (featuring an "inadvertent" sign of the cross), Viața cea de toate zilele is seen by Panait as "communicating [Velisar's] faith in general human values such as solidarity, tolerance, power of maternal and marital love.

[14] Petru Comarnescu, who read Viața... as a psychological novel, was impressed by the work, calling it a sample of "Romanian gentleness and spiritual greatness", "vastly different from the literary production of contemporary writers.

"[22] According to critic Bianca Burța-Cernat, the general tone of these works is "idyllic and moralizing", "involuntary a-temporal", and indebted to La Medeleni, as well as to the (Poporanist) traditionalism cultivated by Viața Românească.

Păstorel was highly visible as the author of anti-communist propaganda,[28] while Teodoreanu and his wife wrote texts deploring the destruction of Greater Romania in 1940.

[38] The following year, Velisar completed Anna Karenina (on which she worked with Mihail Sevastos and I. Popovici) and Resurrection (with Ludmila Vidrașcu); then returned with versions of Vsevolod Garshin's "Four Days" (in 1962, again with Xenia Stroe), and Leonid Andreyev's novellas (with Isabella Dumbravă, 1963).

[3] In 1959, Păstorel was eventually arrested for his clandestine literature, implicated in the show trial of Constantin Noica (alongside Dinu Pillat),[2] and held for three years at Aiud and Gherla prisons.

[46] In 2010, Humanitas publishing house also issued her correspondence with the Pillats as part of the collective volume Minunea timpului trăit ("The Miracle of Time Spent").