[5] One London weekly[6] wrote admiringly of a poem in Bevington's 1879 Key-Notes, describing it as "an exposition of the theory, physical and moral, of Evolution, which she entitles, 'Unto This Present'.
If it were nothing else, it would be quite remarkable, as a literary tour de force, for the extraordinary ingenuity and success with which the writer has reduced to verse that never ceases to have a certain smoothness and even harmony, an argument bristling, so to speak, with philosophical terms.
Another reviewer, however, found that Bevington's style was one for which, "in the present condition of the English language, there is no vocabulary, but which exactly corresponds to the peculiar qualities known as 'goodiness,' 'cant,' and 'unctuosity,' when the writer or speaker happens to be content with the faith of his or her fathers.
In an article in The Nineteenth Century in October 1879, entitled "Atheism and Morality", Bevington took a clear secularist position that provoked a clerical response.
Duty, on secular principles, consists in the summarized conduct conducive to the permanent protection and progressive amelioration of the human lot....
"[8] A further contribution to the debate was prompted by a letter to Bevington from the philosopher Herbert Spencer, pointing out that rationalists showed greater humanity than adherents of organized religion.
However, Bevington rejected the tactics of bombs and dynamite and became associated with another paper, Liberty, edited by the Scottish anarchist and tailor James Tochatti, for which she wrote numerous articles and poems.
[12] Shortly before her death from dropsy and mitral heart disease on 28 November 1895 on Lechmere Road, Willesden Green, Middlesex (now London Borough of Brent), at the age of fifty, Bevington wrote further articles for Liberty and published a final collection of poems,[12] of which some were later set to music.