She attended boarding school in New England, where she first met Ruth S. Granniss, librarian to the Grolier Club; the two were close friends throughout their lives.
In this capacity, Bartlett could examine first-hand copies of most of the early editions of Shakespeare and contemporary writers, which prepared her to write the Census that is her greatest legacy.
Bartlett herself noted that there were “no regular lectures on these subjects except in some of the large colleges and those very recent.”[11] Subjects included textual editing, cataloguing, collecting, provenance, and the history of printing, as well as lectures on a range of topics and authors in English literature: Shakespeare, seventeenth-century poetry, English prose fiction, and Alexander Pope.
[14] In 1913, Bartlett was commissioned by the Elizabethan Club to co-edit the 1916 Census of Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto with the British bibliographer Alfred W. Pollard.
[20] In the ensuing years, she published prolifically on the early texts of Shakespeare’s plays and was frequently asked to give public lectures.
As she wrote wryly to a colleague in 1916: "I speak at U[niversity] of P[ennsylvania] April 12th on 'Shakespeare Folios and Quartos' and Prof. Schelling is sadly asking if I have any academic degrees!
She sorted out the proper ordering of the preliminary material in the First Folio for Carl Pforzheimer, for instance, noting that she had typed her letter to him herself "as I am afraid of mistakes of importance if I have it copied, unfortunately I am not as good a typist as a bibliographer, hence the erasures.
Not only did she continually assist me in the collection of data, the preparation of the copy, and the arduous reading of the proofs, but her accurate mind and well-balanced judgment have done more than I am able to express towards making this Guide acceptable to the public and useful to the general reader.”[24]