She excavated over many years at Mycenae and at other sites in Greece and Turkey, where she lived with her husband at the British Institute at Ankara.

[4] Following this excavation, the family stayed in Athens, where Wace attended a British Council school; after the outbreak of World War II, Wace and her mother left for America in June 1940, before joining her father in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1944 on his appointment as Professor of Classics and Archaeology at the Farouk I University at Alexandria.

[5] After graduating, French studied for a Diploma in Conservation at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and then taught Classics at the Royal Masonic School for Girls, Rickmansworth, joining the excavations at Mycenae during the summers as she had during her undergraduate studies; while teaching, she began working on a part-time PhD at University College London, under the supervision of the classicist and poet Martin Robertson, on The development of Mycenaean terracotta figures.

[4][5][7]: 461  During this time she also attended the British School at Athens as a student (1958–59) and, thanks to a Virginia Gildersleeve Fellowship from the International Federation of University Women, spent the next year (1959–60) in Greece studying Mycenaean material for her thesis as well as finds from Ayios Stephanos and Tiryns, and excavating at Mycenae and Knossos.

[4][8] In her PhD thesis, she developed a detailed classification scheme for a series of Mycenaean terracotta figurines dating from the Late Helladic period (c. 1500–1100 BC).

[9] She excavated at Mycenae for many years, from 1950-1957 with her father Alan Wace, and following his death with Lord William Taylour and George Mylonas until 1969, and developed a systematic classification of Mycenaean pottery, enabling its use in establishing the relative date of archaeological finds.

[5] French served as the Warden of Ashburne Hall, a residential hall of the University of Manchester, from 1976 to 1989, during which time she was also an honorary lecturer in the Manchester Department of Archaeology; in 1989, she succeeded Hector Catling as Director of the British School at Athens,[11] becoming the first woman to hold the post.