Despite the family's ongoing economic precarity, Holcroft received "a broad and liberal education in modern languages and the arts.

"[2] Thomas Holcroft knew and worked with leading figures of the intelligentsia such as Thomas Paine and William Godwin, and Holcroft shared her father's Jacobin ideals and supported his work to the point where she shared in the public abuse his politics generated.

Fanny Holcroft began publishing poetry when she was seventeen: in 1797 the January, February, and October issues of the Monthly Magazine printed "Annabella," "The Penitent Mother," and the abolitionist "The Negro," respectively.

She made one or two short-lived forays into teaching: she lost a position as a governess due to a story in The Times that her father was a French spy,[2] and applied to the Royal Literary Fund in 1809 for help to start a school.

[4] According to Gary Kelly, "These adapt Thomas Holcroft's reformist politics to the post-Napoleonic era of emergent liberalism with stories of vicissitudes in private life, recommending personal virtue and social conciliation.