Her literary career began when she was a teenager, her poems appearing in Charles Dickens's periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round, and later in feminist journals.

Few 20th-century critics have discussed her work because of Procter's religious beliefs, but her poetry is beginning to be re-evaluated as showing technical skill.

[2] The family had strong literary ties: novelist Elizabeth Gaskell enjoyed her visits to the Procter household,[3] and Procter's father was friends with poet Leigh Hunt, essayist Charles Lamb, and novelist Charles Dickens,[4] as well as being acquainted with poet William Wordsworth[5] and critic William Hazlitt.

[2] The college had been founded in 1848 by Frederick Maurice, a Christian Socialist; the faculty included novelist Charles Kingsley, composer John Hullah, and writer Henry Morley.

[14] Her third volume of poetry, A Chaplet of Verses (1861), was published for the benefit of a Catholic Night Refuge for Women and Children that had been founded in 1860 at Providence Row in East London.

[23] Procter's poetry was strongly influenced by her religious beliefs and charity work; homelessness, poverty, and fallen women are frequent themes.

[34] While critics have long dismissed Procter because her poetry is "straightforward" and religious (and thus deemed full of "sentimental excesses"[35]), her work shows technical skill in its playing with ambiguities of stress and "temporal dislocation.

[40] Readers valued Procter's poems for their plainness of expression,[41] although they were considered "not so very original in thought; [their merit is that] they are indeed the utterances 'of a believing heart', pouring out its fulness.

[44] Composer Hermine Küchenmeister-Rudersdorf set Procter’s text to music in her song “Shadow.”[45] Her work was also published in the United States and translated into German.

[46] Critics such as Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Kathleen Hickok, and Natalie Joy Woodall argue that the demise of Procter's reputation is due at least in part to the way Charles Dickens characterized her as a "model middle-class domestic angel"[47] and a "fragile and modest saint"[48] rather than as an "active feminist and strong poet.

The few critics who have examined Procter's poetry generally find it important for the way that she overtly expresses conventional sentiments while covertly undermining them.

According to Isobel Armstrong, Procter's poetry, like that of many 19th-century women poets, employs conventional ideas and modes of expression without necessarily espousing them in entirety.

[50] Francis O'Gorman cites "A Legend of Provence" as an example of a poem with this kind of "double relationship with the structures of gender politics it seems to affirm.

"[51] Other critics since Armstrong agree that Procter's poetry, while ladylike on the surface, shows signs of repressed emotions and desires.

[54] Elizabeth Gray criticizes the fact that the few discussions of Procter's poetry that do exist focus primarily on gender, arguing that the "range and formal inventiveness of this illuminatingly representative Victorian poet have remained largely unexplored.