Brady was born an American citizen in Tientsin, China, and traveled frequently as a child, spending time in Los Angeles, California, British Columbia, and Austin, Texas.

The following three years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania, until, at the end of 1949, Brady moved to teach at Central Oregon Community College; her resignation due to "ill health" was announced a few months later.

[1] After being named the 1952–53 Marion Talbot Fellow of the American Association of University Women and writing two articles, Brady's scholarship ceased for a quarter of a century.

[2] Her papers on Beowulf, meanwhile, were identified by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, as "three fundamental studies" that were "philological in the traditional sense", shedding light on "the shades of meaning of the diction" used in the poem.

[3] Brady concluded that the Beowulf poet "is no artificer mechanically piling up synonyms and conventional metaphors, but an artist who knows how to use a variety of words and phrases".

[26] The ship carried only two families and a woman traveling alone, in addition to a cargo of pig iron, and had what the Los Angeles Herald described as "a rough voyage across the Pacific", striking a whale.

[7] Though the Herald had described Brady's father as a Standard Oil engineer,[26] by the end of World War I he was serving overseas as part of the Rainbow Division of the United States Army National Guard,[27] in France and Germany as first a captain and then a major.

[29] Brady was active in a number of organizations at UCLA, including Beta Phi Alpha, the YWCA, and the Prytanean Society, of which she was president.

[6][54][note 2] The $2,200 fellowship was for "a study and reinterpretation of the substantial compounds and phrases in Old English poetry", looking at contextual word usage to "determine whether the various poets used them in exactly the same way".

[6] Brady's work was to take place at Johns Hopkins and Harvard,[note 3] and in 1952 she published two related articles: "The Synonyms for 'Sea' in Beowulf",[60] and "The Old English Nominal Compounds in -rád".

[70][71] Brady's thesis gained less traction than her ability to investigate the intractable problems of Germanic myth, and the convoluted nature of the related scholarship.

[2] Such disregard caused one reviewer to label Brady's work "more valuable in the sphere of criticism than construction,"[73] and another to note that her "conclusions are reached without reliance on the views of predecessors, and one may be sure that, in some quarters, the volume will be thoroughly combed for flaws to match those it has uncovered in the reasoning of others".

[74] Indeed, after Brady's "vigorous tilting with no less a scholar than Kemp Malone,"[75] he penned two separate reviews disparaging what he termed her scholastic immaturity, and suggesting "she overestimates the worth of debaters' points".

Though I cannot accept her hypothesis as proved, [the book] is without doubt one of the most important works in that difficult subject of heroic legend that has come from American scholarship in recent years.