Writer and biographer William Hayley was a family friend and he mentored Starke from a young age.

[6] Her family had vested interests in India since her grandfather's time, and she used that country as a background for the first of her plays to be professionally produced, The Sword of Peace (1788).

Her second professional production, the successful The Widow of Malabar (1790), "[e]mbellished with the rituals of Indian sati – a burning funeral pyre – and with specially composed music, ... was something of a spectacle.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Starke returned to Italy and devoted the rest of her life to revisions of her travel guides, effectively reinventing the genre.

[8] Compiling a bibliography of her work is a complicated task as she frequently revised her guides and sometimes changed their titles.

[9] Earlier travel guides traditionally concentrated on architectural and scenic descriptions of the places usually visited by wealthy young men on the Grand Tour.

The French author Stendhal, in his 1839 novel The Charterhouse of Parma, refers to a travelling British historian who "never paid for the smallest trifle without first looking up its price in the Travels of a certain Mrs Starke,[11] a book which...indicates to the prudent Englishman the cost of a turkey, an apple, a glass of milk and so forth."