At the age of fifteen, at Liverpool, she played Rosetta in Love in a Village and subsequently her best known role of Lady Townly in The Provoked Husband by Colley Cibber.

[citation needed] She was introduced by Younger, her Liverpool manager, to George Colman and made her first appearance in London at the Haymarket on 9 June 1777, playing Miss Hardcastle.

She "created" few original parts: Lady Sash in The Camp, assigned to Sheridan, Drury Lane, 15 October 1778; Mrs Sullen in Colman's Separate Maintenance, Drury Lane, 31 August 1779; Cecilia in Miss Lee's Chapter of Accidents, Haymarket, 5 August 1780; Almeida in Pratt's The Fair Circassian, 27 November 1781; and the heroines of various comedies and dramas of Mrs. Cowley, Mrs. Inchbald, General Burgoyne, Miles Peter Andrews, and of other writers.

The last original part she played was the heroine of Holcroft's Force of Ridicule, 6 December 1796, which was unfavourably received on its first night and remains unprinted.

On her last appearance, 8 April 1797, she played Lady Teazle; a large audience was attracted, and Farren, after speaking the farewell lines of her part, burst into tears.

Hazlitt speaks of "Miss Farren, with her fine-lady airs and graces, with that elegant turn of her head and motion of her fan and tripping of her tongue" (Criticisms and Dramatic Essays, 1851, p. 49).

Horace Walpole spoke of her as the most perfect actress he had ever seen, and Mrs. Siddons, on the day of Farren's marriage, commiserated the loss of "our comic muse."

A life-size portrait of her by Sir Thomas Lawrence, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was shown at the Royal Academy annual exhibition in 1790.

[Works cited; Memoirs of the Present Countess of Derby, late Miss Farren, by Petronius Arbiter, esq., London, quarto, n.d. (1797); The Testimony of Truth to the Exalted Merit, or a Biographical Sketch of the Countess of Derby, London, quarto, 1797 (a reply to the preceding); John Genest, Account of the English Stage; Monthly Mirror, April 1797; Thespian Dictionary; Tea-Table Talk, by Mrs. Mathews, 1857.]