[2] She studied acting at Victoria University for a period and obtained a speech and drama qualification from Trinity College.
[2] She gave up her promising acting career shortly after marrying fellow poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell in 1958, having met him the previous year at a book party.
[5] After her first child was born, Campbell suffered from a combination of postpartum depression and bipolar disorder, and had a nervous breakdown.
[5] They had agreed before their death that they would publish a collection together; reviewer Graham Brazier said their "poems of enduring love have a truly timeless quality".
In The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Roger Robinson suggests that the role of mythology within her poetry speaks about gender roles and sexuality as well as domesticity; he states that Campbell's poetry "can form unexpected links, between the mythic and the domestic, for instance, as in 'Maui', or the universal and psychological, as in 'Things Random' or 'Evolution'.