[1] Unable due to her mother's health to attend Bryn Mawr College, Murphy followed the Harvard University curriculum at home.

A 1926 letter written from France by F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, "Nobody was in Antibes that summer... except me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguett, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the MacLeishes, Charlie Brackett, Maud Kahn (daughter of philanthropist Otto Kahn; wife of Major-General Sir John Marriott), Esther Murphy (sister of Gerald; wife of John Strachey), Marguerite Namara, E. Oppenheimer (sic), Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and Crystal Eastman, ex-premier Orlando, Etienne de Beaumont..."[3][4] When in Paris, she frequented Janet Flanner (who would later become a lover of her sister-in-law, Noël Haskins Murphy) and Solita Solano, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Dolly Wilde and Natalie Clifford Barney (who was Murphy's passionate obsession).

[2] In 1928 Djuna Barnes wrote a satirical group biography of Natalie Clifford Barney's Parisian circle, the Ladies Almanack (1928), in which Murphy's caricature is "Bounding Bess."

"[2] She published essays and books, was a public speaker, and was a regular panelist along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and Fanny Hurst on the ABC radio program Listen – The Women!.

Cohen was intrigued by their invisibility: "if she is remembered at all today, it is as Gerald Murphy's eccentric, pathetic sister, a marvel who became a spectacular disappointment.