She contributed articles to magazines and wrote many stories, among them Midshipman Bob, Jet, the War Mule, The Taming of Polly, The Children of Avalon, The Jose Maria, The Two Tramps, Saxty's Angel, Pickle and Pepper, The End of the White Man's Trail, and Pocahontas.

She was one of the indexers and Russian translators in the Scientific Library of the United States Department of the Interior, and during the Spanish–American War, was a volunteer assistant in the Hospital Corps of the Daughters of the American Revolution, serving on the executive staff and handling all correspondence relating to Roman Catholic Sisters who served as contract nurses in the United States, Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The entire family on both sides were in the Confederacy, with the exception of her father and her only brother, who died on the ramparts of "Fort Hell", where he had dashed up with the colors, caught from the color-bearer, and stood cheering his comrades to the charge.

[3][1] Dorsey began her literary career as a journalist and was for several years the "Vanity Fair" of the Washington Critic, leaving that paper to take a special correspondence on the Chicago Tribune.

Her first three stories appeared almost simultaneously, "The Knickerbocker Ghost" and "The Tsar's Horses" in the Catholic World and "Back from the Frozen Pole" in Harper's Magazine.

[4] In addition to a large number of contributions to the press and many periodicals, she was the author of the following books: Midshipman Bob, Jet, the War Mule, The Taming of Polly, The Children of Avalon, The Jose Maria, The Two Tramps, Saxty's Angel, Pickle and Pepper, The End of the White Man's Trail, and Pocahontas.