Her father worked as a tea planter in Almora in India then founded an English-speaking newspaper in Tangier, Times of Morocco.

Housman supplied a reference for her in 1900, commending her for enthusiasm "such as I have seldom known" and for her "zeal" at composing Latin prose and verse.

[6] During World War I Meakin took the job of a chemist's assistant but writing was her career.

She and her mother, Sarah Meakin, were the first English women to travel to Japan on board the Trans-Siberian railway.

Her book "A Ribbon of Iron"[8] also described their stop-overs in Omsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and for a trip on the nearby Yenisei River which flows to the Arctic Ocean.