She participated numerous times with the Royal Academy throughout her career from 1870 to 1916, and her works include landscapes, scenes of rural life, and history painting.

Beginning in the 1850s, she wrote novels, newspaper and magazine articles, and travel writing under the pseudonym Cycla.

Clacy's works of rural and northern life have been analyzed by art historian Deborah Cherry as the responses of a metropolitan tourist to an unknown place.

[4] In 1880, the Walker Art Gallery exhibited Flight, priced at £50[5] and called "a very charming evening landscape" by The Academy weekly review.

[7] In 1886 Clacy also exhibited The Cry from the Snowdrift at the Royal Academy, which was reviewed as "a carefully-finished work" by Truth.