She is seen as a forerunner of a Scottish Renaissance in inter-war poetry – her verse marks a departure from the Lallans tradition of Robert Burns towards that of Hugh MacDiarmid, Violet Jacob and others.
Her grandfather on her mother's side was William Watson, sheriff-substitute of Aberdeen from 1829 to 1866, who in 1841 founded there the first industrial school for street children.
These have been taken to shed indirect light on Angus's life in early adulthood, which included abundant family and church work, and exercise in the form of walking and cycling.
The only surviving body of Marion Angus's correspondence consists of letters to Marie Campbell Ireland, a friend she made in about 1930.
[9] They and other letters betray a vein of disrespect and impatience with conventional society: "I don't know," she wrote to Ireland in about 1930, "that I care particularly for what is usually called 'cultivated people'.
"[11] Marion Angus returned to Arbroath in 1945 to be looked after by an erstwhile family servant, Williamina Sturrock Matthews.
Her work was influenced by the Scottish ballad tradition and by early Scots poets such as Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, rather than by Burns.
Angus herself spoke of her ambitions and limitations as a poet in an address in the 1920s to the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse: "I would fain give voice to Scotland's great adventure of the soul.
"[14] However, Helen Cruickshank notes in a memoir that Angus did not think highly of MacDiarmid as a poet or approve of his experiments in Synthetic Scots.
"[15] The scholar Katherine Gordon saw steady development in her work through the 1920s and 1930s: "The understated lyricism of The Lilt and Other Verses becomes, by the late 1920s, distinctly stronger and more emotionally potent in Sun and Candlelight and The Singin' Lass.
"[16] Her interest in the supernatural in literature emerged early: "One poem which, when I was a child, made my flesh creep and filled me with a tearful pity" was 'The Brownie of Blednoch' by William Nicholson (1782–1849).
That wasnae eneuch: I kent hoo she thocht aboot things frae whit she wrote and wantit mair o her spirit tae come though.
Gey chancie, spookie things happened (whiles gied me the cauld creeps), but in the end I 'won ower the tap'.