She was the first woman to be awarded a chair at the University of London, and only the third in Britain (after Edith Morley and Millicent Mackenzie).

She became a member of the staff of Bedford College, London, in 1901, and successfully competed for the newly created chair for English literature in 1913.

Her most famous work, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us (1935) is a methodologically innovative compendium and analysis of poetic images.

Her own appointment to a professorial chair marked a turning point in the history of women's higher education.

[4] Spurgeon's 1911 Paris doctoral dissertation, Chaucer devant la critique en Angleterre et en France depuis son temps jusqu' nos jours, which she published in three volumes in English in 1929, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, secured her a lasting place in the history of scholarship on the Middle English author.