She wrote Sunday school tales and other semi-religious works, among which were Bishop and Nanette series, and Miriam's Reward.

She grew up in the St Paul's Narragansett Church, of which her father was for 20 years the rector,[3] having thrice been elected to that pastorate.

Perhaps the most widely known of her books are the Bishop and Nanette series, which, as a carefully prepared exposition of the Book of Common Prayer, were used in advanced classes of Episcopal Sunday schools; Sister Eleanor's Brood, a story of the lights and shadows of a country clergyman's family life, in which the gentle, optimistic nature of the author works is used, and which is understood to figure, under a thin veil of fiction, the actual experience of her mother, and the third book, Asleep, addressing bereavement.

After the death of her first husband, Allen N. Smith, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, she married, in 1885, one of her distant relatives, Judge Elias Griswold, of Maryland (or of Washington).

Her last book, entitled Old Wickford, the Venice of America, was published this year by The Young Churchman Company, of Milwaukee.