[1][2] Betts attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before enrolling in illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle's class at Drexel Institute in 1899.

Betts, accompanied by her sister Anna and mutual friend Dorothy Warren, established a studio near Pyle's after he moved to Wilmington, Delaware.

[4][5][6] On July 11, 1910, she gave birth to her daughter Sarah Mellor Bains, who died at six months old from acute otitis media, a pneumonia infection of the middle ear.

Beginning in 1904, she was commissioned to illustrate several books including, James Whitcomb Riley's The Raggedy Man, While the Heart Beats Young, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess.

[10] Betts was a member of both the Philadelphia Water Color Club (WCC)[11] and the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,[12] where she continued to exhibit through the 1920s.