[3] Her mother, Margaret O'Shaughnessy, was a Catholic who eloped at the age of 21 with a Protestant English architect named Powis Hoult.
[8] Hoult married the writer Oliver Stonor, and lived with him at The Cottage in Windsor Great Park for a year; the marriage was dissolved in 1934.
[3] Her next two books, Holy Ireland (1935) and its sequel Coming from the Fair (1937), show Irish family life before World War I.
[9] Fellow Irish writer, Seán Ó Faoláin, wrote to Hoult in 1936 to congratulate her on Holy Ireland.
[7] Contemporary critics are similarly complimentary about her work, comparing her not only to short story writers such as O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor but also to novelists including Kate O'Brien and Edna O'Brien for the way in which her work examines the influence of the Catholic Church on the quotidian lives of Irish women.
[5] The novel There Were No Windows is set in London during the Second World War in which the trauma of the Blitz impacts upon Claire Temple, a novelist suffering with dementia.
[5] Hoult was a friend of many notable Irish figures including Republican James Stephens and poet and physician Oliver St. John Gogarty.