Her grandfather's cousin, Sir John William Kaye, wrote the standard accounts of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the First Afghan War.

In 1926, she briefly returned to live with her family in India, but after her father's death, she was displeased by her mother's pressure to find a junior officer to marry and so returned to England living in London on a small pension based on her late father's army career, augmented first by earnings from illustrating children's books and from 1937 from the publication of children's books written by Kaye.

The British Indian Army officer, Godfrey John Hamilton was four years her junior and reportedly proposed to Kaye on five days' acquaintance.

Kaye's literary agent was Paul Scott, who had been an army officer in India and would find fame as author of The Raj Quartet.

The focal background of Shadow of the Moon is the Sepoy Mutiny with which Kaye had been familiarised but stories heard as a child from her family's native servants.

[4] Kaye would later state her displeasure over the original published version of Shadow of the Moon being edited without her knowledge, with sections focused on action, rather than romance, being largely deleted.

Kaye, inspired by a visit to India, then planned to commence work on an epic novel with the Second Anglo-Afghan War as its background, but she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

[3] Published in 1978, The Far Pavilions became a worldwide bestseller on publication and caused the successful republishing of Shadow of the Moon, with the previously-deleted sections restored, Trade Wind and Kaye's crime novels.