[3][6][7] Her youngest brother Thomas Hopley (1819–1876) was a schoolteacher convicted in the beating death of a student in the Eastbourne manslaughter trial.

During her travels, she met several Confederate leaders, including President Jefferson Davis, Stephen Mallory,[12] Robert E. Lee[2] and Stonewall Jackson.

Unable to cross the Union blockade to return north, she traveled further south, and was a tutor to the children of Florida governor John Milton.

In her two volume Life in the South (1863), she describes her observations of the social culture in Virginia between 1860 and 1862 writing anonymously as "A Blockaded British Subject", "Miss Jones, and under the initials "S.L.J.".

[12]: 127  Hopley's third book, Rambles and Adventures in the Wilds of the West (1872), contained information on American birds, plants, and insects.

[3] The British Quarterly Review described Snakes as "the most thorough, the most complete, and the most popularly readable that has been published in English on the subject.