She also supported the British suffragette movement, and secretly communicated with the Women's Social and Political Union about conditions in prisons.

After retirement in 1921, she wrote the book Penal Discipline (1922), which advocated for reforms to the prison system, and the historical novel Chase of the Wild Goose (1936), based on the Ladies of Llangollen.

This included writing a letter which had been signed by 73 members of the ARMW in 1898 to Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, to criticise measures enacted in the previous year to combat the spread of STDs in the British Army stationed there.

[5][7] The measures included the mandatory medical examinations of women suspected of carrying an STD living near a military building, if they refused they would be expelled from their homes.

When the WSPU headquarters was raided by the police on 23 May 1914, this correspondence was discovered and she was asked by the Home Office to renounce her association with the movement, which she refused to do so.

A review in the British Medical Journal commented that the characters were well-written particularly the convict, and that it taught an important moral, "let a man strive ever so hard to retrieve the social ruin entailed by crime that is found out, he can never, in the eyes of the world, live down his past".

Gordon provided her with men's clothing and a train fare to South Wales, where she obtained work as a coal miner.

Initially this was thought likely as prison commissioners had recognised the need for reform, but after the 1922 general election, the new Home Secretary William Bridgeman decided against it.

[29] A review in The Guardian praised Gordon for telling "their story with sensitiveness and understanding" but suggested that some readers would dislike the fantastical nature of the book's epilogue and her characterisation of the women as early examples of feminists.

[30] A year after the release of the book, Gordon installed a marble relief of the women at St Collen’s Church, Llangollen where they were buried.

Gordon felt that Coombe had been described in the book as "only the pitiful nebulous ghost she had to be" rather than the brave and charismatic woman that she knew from her youth.

She also felt it did not discuss the potential contribution, from her point of view, of Fry's extroverted personality to the deterioration in Coombe's mental health in later life.