"[1] Eyles was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, as the eldest of the three children of Andrew Tennant Pitcairn (1861–1905) and his wife Rosa, née Bevan (1863 or 1864–1902).
[2] Having been forbidden at home to take up a place at a teacher training college, she fled to London at the age of 18 and found an ill-paid job addressing envelopes.
In 1928, she married a journalist, David Leslie Murray, who edited The Times Literary Supplement in 1938–1944, but she retained the name Eyles for her writings.
She became a sought-after trade-union speaker and socialist writer before eventually joining the women's paper Woman's Own as an "agony aunt".
These were supported also by her "slum" novels: Margaret Protests (1919) contrasts urban deprivation with rural freedom, while exploring the still controversial subject of birth control.