She was the creator of the Brinkley Girl, a stylish character who appeared in her comics and became a popular symbol in songs, films and theater.

Women emulated the hairstyles in the cartoons and purchased Nell Brinkley Hair Curlers for ten cents a card.

She had come after two years on the Denver Post, bringing with her a talent for pretty-girl art that had not yet been matured into delicately fine-lined art-nouveau style for which she would become famous.

[3] Brinkley's debut came on November 26, 1907, and she was featured on a comics page that contained her illustrated panel that accompanied an article on actress Valeska Surrat.

[3] After the Thaw trial, Brinkley returned to the women's page and made forays into the entertainment section with reviews of new plays and musicals.

[3] Brinkley's art was now featured in Hearst newspapers all over the country and Americans were sitting up and taking notice of this new young artist.

[3] Brinkley wrote in the pop culture style of the early 20th century, producing breathless prose filled with run-on sentences, liberally sprinkled with dashes.

[4] Brinkley also became known for the charming text that accompanied her stories and reporting while she worked at the Evening Journal and other publications that included Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper's Magazine.

She produced many illustrated theatre reviews and profiles of mothers and young women in society, including later, in the 1930s First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Her work was distributed to newspapers internationally by King Features Syndicate and Brinkley became the most prolific and famous romantic writer-illustrator.

[8][9] The Brinkley Girls (Fantagraphics Books, 2009) collects Brinkley's full-page color art from 1913 to 1940; her earliest adventure series, Golden Eyes and Her Hero, Bill; her romantic series, Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages; her flapper comics from the 1920s; her 1937 pulp magazine-inspired Heroines of Today and unpublished paintings, along with an introduction by the book's editor, Trina Robbins.

[10] Golden Eyes, with Uncle Sam at her side, enlists as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, and they are briefly reunited with Bill in France before duty separates them again.

[3] Intended to glamorize women from many walks of life, both in household work and outside it, married or single, Brinkley portrayed strong women workers like forest-fire spotters, soldiers, police detectives, a woman who acts as rescuer when saving four people from drowning, and a "jungle queen" who was left to survive on her own after her trader husband dies: she is depicted heroically continuing his business while working altruistically with indigenous people.

[3] A notable story was that of Rosetta Millington of Austria, a Red Cross worker who joined the Spanish Foreign Legion during WWII disguised as a man.

Her death went largely unnoticed under the crush of WWII news, but The Associated Press reported she passed in a New Rochelle hospital on the night of October 21, 1944 after a long illness.