Later, her father taught the history of Spanish and Portuguese Jews during his own bout with tuberculosis which had led the family to move to the English coast.
Emanuel, her father, was the lay leader of London's Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and her mother Sarah was active in the city's Jewish community as well.
Her mother, in keeping with post-Inquisition practice among Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, educated the young Aguilar in her religion and its tenets.
Her condition did not stop her from learning to dance and play the harp and piano, common pursuits for middle-class English girls of that era, or traveling.
While Grace was taking care of him, her father taught her the oral history of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, complementing her mother's earlier instruction in Judaism.
Both her religious and literary interests date to that time of her life; she began indulging them both by making her first efforts at poetry and fiction and attending some Protestant services.
[6][7] Sarah Aguilar's health took a turn for the worse during this period, as she recovered from surgical treatment for an illness that has not yet been identified from the records available, and Grace spent time taking care of her as she had her father.
In 1838 Aguilar's father prevailed upon her to translate Isaac Orobio de Castro's Israel Defended, an apologia for Judaism, from the original French for private distribution among Brighton's Jewish community.
She added a preface that, albeit with some ambivalence, explained that she had softened Orobio's castigations of Christians as a result of the tolerance she felt Victorian England had shown to its Jewish population compared with Catholic Spain and Portugal.
He declined, but on her own she was able to persuade Isaac Leeser, editor of The Occident, an American Jewish magazine, to publish her theological tract The Spirit of Judaism as the initial volume of a new series of books he was bringing out.
She befriended Solomon Cohen, the first Jewish state senator in Georgia and his wife Miriam, which contributed to the success of her work in the South as they distributed her books widely there.
However, she still needed to run a boys' Hebrew school with her mother to make enough money to live on, an obligation she complained about bitterly and repeatedly in her letters to Miriam Cohen, since she felt it took away from the time she had to write.
The most popular of the Jewish tales is The Vale of Cedars, or the Martyr: A Story of Spain in the Fifteenth Century, written before 1835, published in 1850, and twice translated into German and twice into Hebrew.
Her other stories founded on Jewish episodes are included in a collection of nineteen tales, Home Scenes and Heart Studies (published posthumously 1852);[18] The Perez Family (1843) and The Edict together with The Escape, had appeared as two separate volumes; the others were reprinted from magazines.
Her domestic tales are Home Influence (1847) and its sequel, The Mother's Recompense (1851), both of them written early in 1836, Woman's Friendship (1851), and Helon: A Fragment from Jewish History (1852).
[18] The first of Aguilar's religious works was a translation of the French version of Israel Defended, by the Marrano Orobio de Castro, printed for private circulation.
A second edition was issued in 1849 by the first American Jewish Publication Society; and a third (Cincinnati, 1864) has an appendix containing thirty-two poems (bearing date 1838-1847), all but two reprinted from "The Occident".
The editor's notes serve mainly to mark dissent from Aguilar's depreciation of Jewish tradition – due probably to her Marrano ancestry and to her country life, cut off from association with Jews.
Despite her almost exclusive intercourse with Christians and her utter lack of prejudice, her purpose, apparently, was to equip English Jewish women with arguments against conversionists.