[2] When eighteen years' old she enrolled at a newly opened local studio run by Rosa Waugh Hobhouse who recognised her talent and encouraged her to study at the Slade School of Art which Saunders attended three days a week in 1907.

By 1912 Saunders' work had become "recognisably Post Impressionist", and in February her painting "Rocks, North Devon" was accepted by The Friday Club (an exhibiting group set up by Vanessa Bell).

[4] Saunders was fluent in both French and German and during World War I worked in the office of the United Kingdom Government Censor.

She was included in the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University when it hosted an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–18 in late 2010.

[4] Later that year, her sister Ethel donated three of her Vorticist drawings to the Tate Gallery, and one to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.