[2] She attended Redland High School in Bristol and St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read for the new English Literature and Language course.
[2] Upon graduation, and finding that employment opportunities for educated women were relatively limited, McLeod worked as a secretary for Gilbert Murray and Bertrand Russell.
[6] Gide's short novel Geneviève, an attempt as he wrote on 9 March 1930 in his journal to address feminism, drew on conversation he had heard in England from Enid, Ethel, Élisabeth and Dorothy Bussy.
At interview for a permanent civil service position in 1945, McLeod expressed an interest in the Foreign Office, from which she was at that point barred at a woman.
[18] During 1947, a financial hiatus left McLeod at a loose end, and she did some uncredited translation work for Stuart Gilbert, on a novel by Pierre Véry (Le pays sans étoiles?
She published biographies of Heloïse, Christine de Pizan, and Charles of Orleans, for which she was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in 1970.
[19] In 1953 her English translations of novels by Colette with biographical content appeared, as well as the autobiographical La Maison de Claudine (1922) with Una Vicenzo Troubridge, and Sido (1930), based on the life of her mother.
[21] McLeod was appointed a Commander of the British Empire, and was an officer of the Legion d'Honneur and of the Ordre des Palmes académiques.