[2] Pinsent attended Somerville College, Oxford, from 1919 to 1922, graduating with second-class honours in modern history.
During World War II, she worked for the Women's Voluntary Service in Cambridge, as a billeting officer.
She took particular interest in the lives of children in crisis, and after the war she chaired the juvenile panel of the Cambridge magistrates' courts from 1949 to 1958.
She joined the management committee of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, and in 1959 became president of the Howard League for Penal Reform.
The incident occurred in the Lake District when ‘a large rock, about 5 ft. high, suddenly broke away' when her husband took hold of it.