A feminist, her controversial 1925 autobiography, My First Thirty Years (published in Paris, France) received some favorable reviews but was also suppressed, and she soon after disappeared.

The book included frank coverage of incest and bestiality in addition to rape, advocated for birth control, and praised socialism and the Soviet Union.

[4] It received some favorable notices;[1] literary reviewer H. L. Mencken called it "the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash"[4] but speculated that "This book, I suspect, comes out with a Paris imprint because no American publisher would risk printing it" for its frank descriptions.

[4] Beasley was living in London, where the authorities regarded her book as obscene, accused her of "sending improper matter through the mails" and attempted to deport her to the United States.

In 1927 she did sail for America, and en route wrote a letter to the U.S. State Department in which she claimed the British authorities and "certain people in Texas" had threatened her life.

A few days after her arrival in New York, she was committed to the state asylum, later known as, Central Islip Psychiatric Center, where she died decades later in 1955.