Her father travelled extensively during the first fifteen years of her life, and she lived in New Zealand, Mexico, United States and throughout Europe, until the family settled in Tonbridge, England, in 1874.

In 1901 she began lecturing on Swahili at King's College London, becoming the school's only woman professor.

[2][3] In 1917 she joined the School of Oriental Studies, moving up from lecturer to reader to professor of Swahili and Bantu languages, and retiring in 1929-1930.

[4] Although not known as a major poet, her poem "Bannerman of Dandenong" has appeared in a number of important Australian poetry anthologies.

According to The New York Times: The writer Ethel F. Heddle novelized their experience in her 1896 book, Three Girls in a Flat, in which she described the ambivalent experience when the freedom of living alone collides with "the sordid, matter-of-fact worries incident on having very little money.