[2] In 1910 she moved to South Africa to marry Hobart Kay, FRCS; by 1916 they had settled in Port Elizabeth.

She travelled widely in South Africa and sketched as she went, and was also commissioned to make many portraits of mayors of Port Elizabeth, many of them lost when the City Hall burned down in 1977.

In preparation for this painting she visited three hospitals and observed at least two operations, making 27 pages of preliminary sketches of people and equipment used in surgery.

[2] In her early days at Port Elizabeth, Kay was a keen sailor and was described as "for a time the fastest spinnaker-hand in South Africa".

Her daughter Joan Wright (1911-1991) taught painting at the Port Elizabeth Technical College School of Art and Design, and her daughter Marjorie Reynolds wrote and published a biography of her mother in 1989, and a further book about the Elvery family in 1991, and also donated her mother's collection of works and archives to the Iziko South African National Gallery as "The Kay Bequest" in 1992.