Like many Gilded Age debutantes from the United States, she married into the British aristocracy and took on the running of her husband's family's ancestral seat, Hinchingbrooke House.

She was a friend and devotee of the Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda, whom she had met in her childhood when he stayed at her family's New York estate.

Lady Sandwich hosted Vivekananda in Chicago, New York, and Paris, accompanied him on a trip to Rome, and corresponded with him throughout her life.

[1] Her maternal grandfather was a Scottish immigrant who lived in the American southeast, where he owned slaves; slavery being a common practice amongst the elite of this Antebellum South.

[4][2] After her father died, her mother remarried to New York wholesale grocer Francis H. Leggett in a small ceremony in Paris.

[13] Lady Sandwich was close friends with Mildred Barnes Bliss of Dumbarton Oaks, and the two were accomplished musicians and fluent in several languages.

[18] Lady Sandwich and her husband honeymooned in Venice for a month before sailing to the United States to stay at Ridgely Manor in September 1905.

[2] Not used to the scandals of British society, Lady Sandwich, who was described as being "a little on the pure-minded side", took to bed as an invalid for fourteen years, leaving the raising of children to her husband and a nurse.