[2] She studied languages and literature at Somerville College, Oxford and later worked as a journalist and translator in London and Paris before World War II.
From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Wilkins wrote poetry, publishing about 40 poems in various literary journals, including the poetic sequence "Oranges and Lemons".
[1] Several of her poems were included in Kenneth Rexroth's anthology The New British Poets, published by New Directions in 1949.
[5] In 1953 she had a research fellowship at Bedford College in London, then went to Rome with Kaiser on a grant from the Bollingen Foundation to study Musil's estate.
[6] In 1967 or 1968, she was appointed as a professor at the University of Reading and established the Musil Research Unit with her husband.