A year later, she and their children travelled with him to Canada upon his appointment as Governor General, where her assistance in turning Rideau Hall into a centre of social activity included literary readings and presentation of plays in which she herself sometimes performed.

Prior to her departure, she was asked by Queen Victoria to initiate a plan to improve the situation for women in India in illness and in child-bearing.

[4] Whilst there had been previous initiatives to provide Western medical care for women in India, Lady Dufferin's fund was the first to deliver a co-ordinated programme with official backing.

Some of the early Indian women beneficiaries of this fund included: Kadambini Basu who entered medical college in 1883; Anandabai Joshi, and Rukhmabai.

[10] When the Earl's term in India ended in 1888, they travelled back to their home at Clandeboye in Ireland and her husband was elevated in the peerage as the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava that same year.

[2] After her husband died in 1902, she spent much of her time in a relatively modest house in Chelsea, London, economising when possible to help her sons as the family fortune had been depleted by sales of land and unwise investments.