[3] This earned her a comfortable living (rising to over £500 a year) which enabled her to spend long periods travelling in France and Spain—the latter becoming her adopted homeland.
[2][4] Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th-century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the George IV) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson.
According to Steen's account in Looking Glass, they met in Andalucia in May 1935, and by mid-June were living together at Nicholson's mews studio in Apple Tree Yard, off Jermyn Street.
[5] Steen had a fair artistic talent herself, as evidenced by the illustrations in Oakfield Plays, and in a surviving watercolour sketch of Ellen Terry in the V&A.
Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing (1941); this was the first part of a trilogy, but the remaining volumes were far less popular.