Thanks to her son Joseph Needham's later fame as a highly distinguished biochemist and sinologist, the private belongings – including the papers of his mother – of him were archived, first at the University of Bath, and now in Cambridge.

[4] The overview of the "Joseph Needham Papers" at Cambridge mentions that her extensive diaries reveal a very unhappy marriage, but there is no word about it in her typescript autobiography, which she had intended for publication.

They were so prolific, these years, that I sometimes, if tired, feared to look at a poetry book lest a poem might strike me and set itself instantaneously to music in my head, and I should be inclined to run away and set it down.”[5] An active member to and benefactress of the Pan-Celtic movement which existed from 1899 until c. 1910, and one of the attendants of the Pan-Celtic Congress of Caernarfon of 1904 (who was photographed there in Celtic revival dress and modern dress),[6] she was made the first woman President of the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 1906, with fellow presidents of the calibre like the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London and two lords.

More than 300 composers sent in their contribution, and Alicia Needham went away with the £100 award for a song which she wrote in a last-minute fashion while she was accidentally staying in a room at Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel.

She was forced to sell the house and furniture, paintings, books and china and had to move into a considerably smaller flat in a less fashionable district of the city.

The "Joseph Needham Papers" in Cambridge reveal that she turned to astrology and occultism; she began to believe in the rebirthing of the dead and devoted time to so-called "spirit photography".