Rosemary Bailey is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers, the Society of Authors and a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.

She followed that by several years as a freelance journalist in London and New York City, writing about travel, women's issues, food, fashion and literary matters for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, Elle, Vogue and others.

[6][7][8] A new edition of Scarlet Ribbons was published in 2017 to considerable acclaim, including the BBC Radio 4 broadcast A priest with AIDS.

[11][12] Subsequent books explored the Pyrenees further, The Man who Married a Mountain (2005) about a 19th-century mountaineer, Sir Henry Russell-Killough, and the award-winning[13] Love and War in the Pyrenees[11][14] about World War II in the region, Camp de Rivesaltes, described by The Jewish Chronicle as "a quiet triumph of historical reconstruction.

"[15] Bailey was a writing tutor for the Arvon Foundation,[16] a contributor to Jewish Book Week[17] and between 2010-2012 and 2014-2015 a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund at Queen Mary University of London.