She was a founding member of the Conservative Primrose League, collected art, and cultivated a social network of talented friends including writers, artists, and politicians.

Nevill was born at 2 Berkeley Square,[1] one of five children of Horatio Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford (1783–1858) and Mary Fawkener, daughter of William Augustus Fawkener, sometime envoy extraordinary at St Petersburg and close friend of Catherine II of Russia.

[2] Nevill travelled extensively and cultivated a large circle of literary and artistic friends, with a sprinkling of politicians, including James McNeill Whistler, Richard Cobden, Joseph Chamberlain and Benjamin Disraeli, whom she greatly admired.

[3] Her exotic plants were housed in seventeen conservatories and were the subject of numerous articles in journals on horticulture.

[6] The breadth of her interests was summarized by Virginia Woolf in a sketch of her life: Now she illuminated leaves which had been macerated to skeletons; now she interested herself in improving the breed of donkeys; next she took up the cause of silkworms, almost threatened Australia with a plague of them, and "actually succeeded in obtaining enough silk to make a dress"; again she was the first to discover that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense, into little boxes; she went into the question of funguses and established the virtues of the neglected English truffle; she imported rare fish; spent a great deal of energy in vainly trying to induce storks and Cornish choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china; emblazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of pigeons, produced wonderful effects "as of an aerial orchestra" when they flew through the air.

To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at luncheon in Charles Street.

[7]In the 1860s Lady Dorothy had established a large ceramic collection including Sèvres porcelain objects.

Nevill wrote a number of volumes of memoirs:[9] Lady Dorothy died in 1913 at her home at 45 Charles Street, Mayfair, where a memorial plaque was unveiled on 8 September 1998.