[2] Proud began her career as a picture researcher in 1971, during which time she developed an interest in the works of Florentine painter Botticelli.
[2] However, after the digitization of images, she left her career as a picture researcher to begin teaching creative writing to American students at the University of Oxford.
A Tabernacle for the Sun was long-listed for the Mann Booker Prize (1997) and won a Southern Arts bursary and a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship.
All her subsequent historical fiction, including the next two volumes of her trilogy, Pallas and the Centaur (2004, 2012) and The Rebirth of Venus (2008), has been released under the imprint of Godstow Press.
[8][9] In recent years, Proud has lectured on Renaissance philosophy and questioned the boundaries between historians and novelists in History Today.
[12][13] In September 2018 she marked a departure from the Renaissance with the publication of a novel, Chariot of the Soul, set in Britain on the eve of the Roman invasion.