She worked for 20 years in London at the Natural History section of the British Museum, and from 1969 to 1984 in the zoology department of the University of New South Wales.
As well as publishing scholarly papers on taxonomy, her books Marine Mammals with Richard Harrison, and Seals of the World (1964, updated 1983) are standard reference works.
[2] King was made a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales in December 1987.
[1] King married Basil Marlow who was the Curator of Mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney.
She died in April 2010 at Maitland, in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales.