[2] In the 1920s Eve and her sister worked their way around the countryside of Gippsland as agricultural labourers, which experience forms the base of her first novel The Pea Pickers.
[2] Langley worked in Auckland as a book repairer 1950–1955, and then visited Australia 1956–1957, where she travelled extensively through the east coast.
Hal Porter wrote in 1965 about many of the writers he had met, and said that "of them all, Eve Langley is the one with whom, on a first meeting, I spent the most dazzling day, enlivened by the unforeseen".
[2] Langley first made a name for herself as a writer in New Zealand in the 1930s where, with Douglas Stewart, Gloria Rawlinson and Robin Hyde, her poetry was regularly published in magazines.
She wrote actively during her twenties – journals, letters, poems and stories – and some of these writings were used in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Pea-Pickers, which was published in 1942.
The Pea-Pickers has been described as "a fanciful, autobiographical, first-person narrative of the adventures of two young women, 'Steve' and 'Blue' who seek excitement, love and 'poetry' in rural Gippsland".
In an interview in 1964, Langley described her writing process as "embroidery of literature" and saw herself as "one who chatters and embroiders all the time, endlessly, a great fantasy of romance".
[9] McLeod describes her as "a subtle, ironic and complex novelist"[11] and says that her best voice is "sometimes lyrical, sometimes cynical, with a marvellous descriptive flair and an ear for dialogue".
The first group – The Pea-Pickers, White Topee, Wild Australia, The Victorians and Bancroft House – "reconfigures her life in Gippsland, intermingling this story with those of the bushmen and women of the 1880s, and further embellishing her text with poems, playlets, songs and paeans of praise addressed to ancient gods and mythical lands".
In them she again entwines her stories, but "now with apparently current and factual journal entries tangled in the genre-blurring tapestry of poetry, fantasy and multi-faceted subjectivity".
McLeod describes how she and her colleague, Anita Segerberg, edited, in 1993-4, the unpublished Auckland novels, but says that they were not published due to permission being refused by Langley's daughter, Bisi.
In her introduction to this work, Frost writes "She was Eve Langley and Oscar Wilde, Australian woman and English man – poet caught in the woe of World War II and immortal, one of the ancients come again to life".