[3] Her mother, Anne (née Lodge), had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, becoming a portrait painter and a friend of Mary Cassatt in Paris.

The rest of her childhood was spent in her family hometown of Claymont, Delaware, and she went on to, study "painting in Philadelphia, more because my mother and father were painters than because I was one.

She chose a career in literature, with her first romantic novel Pocketful of Poses appearing in 1923, the same year she published a children's book, with her brother Dillwyn as illustrator.

She repeated on the annual bestsellers list again in 1928 with All Kneeling, that was made into the 1950 film Born to Be Bad, starring Joan Fontaine and Robert Ryan.

She endowed the "Anne Parrish Titzell Professor of Neurology" chair at Cornell University, originally for research and treatment of mental and emotional disorders.