Hartley inherited her father's passion for teaching, and she first worked as a teacher in Southport, where she was brought up.

[1] She published Life: the Modeller which was a novel set against her knowledge of art, although its history attracted only minor interest.

They had a house in Youlgreave in Derbyshire where they put together The Story of Seville which was published as part of The Medieval Towns series of guides.

Her husband joined in the correspondence in 1907 which itemised points of fact and attribution that Dodgson felt that Hartley had overlooked and this dispute was published by The Academy magazine.

During this time she was writing articles about contemporary artists such as the British painter John Collier for The New Age.

Her advocacy for the region saw her publish Spain Revisited: a Summer Holiday in Galicia in 1911 (which was translated into Galician in 1999).

Her latter works were The Position of Women in primitive society, Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes, Woman's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards, Divorce (Today and Tomorrow), Mind of the Naughty Child and latterly Women, Children, Love and Marriage in 1924.