She was the niece of the noted barrister and judge, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, and the painter Kate Perugini.

[5] As a child she was taken to hear Dickens perform A Christmas Carol during one of his last public readings, and later in life recollected her shock at seeing her grandfather crying over the death of Tiny Tim.

And to Tiny Tim himself I owe my one intensely painful and distressing memory of my grandfather, for the climax of my discomfort was reached at last when it dawned upon my poor little faculties that "Venerables" was "crying."

I never read the little scene in the carol where Bob Cratchit breaks down – the moment, I suppose, of this tragedy – without remembering the horror and dismay which seized upon me then.

I knew nothing whatever about acting; any ideas I had about "pretending" were associated with the Christmas pantomime, and did not assimilate at all with the solitary appearance of my grandfather on a dull-looking platform.

She authored several popular sentimental and melodramatic novels during the 1890s, including Cross Currents (1891), probably her best known work, A Mere Cypher (1893), A Valiant Ignorance (1894), and Prisoners of Silence (1895).