She left school aged 14 to study art privately in the Netherlands for a year with Marian Gobius and Albert Termote [nl].

[1][2] In the summer of 1939 in Paris, through mutual friends she met the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler and they became close.

In the chaos following the declaration of war and the subsequent harassment and internment of Koestler by the French, she managed to save a copy of the translation and smuggle it to England in 1940, where in the following year it was published under the title Darkness at Noon.

[2] In 1951, she created the sculpture Youth for the Festival of Britain, modelled on a full size body cast of the artist.

Originally displayed in front of the 51 bar on the festival's South Bank site, the statue has recently been re-discovered in the grounds of a house in Hampstead once occupied by the sculptor.