Her best-known books were those written for teenage girls, that contained elements of suspense and the supernatural and were anchored in historical settings.
[3][4] After graduation, she moved back to Glasgow, where she taught kindergarten at Laurel Bank School for three years.
With a printing office in London as well, they produced popular educational series including 'Whitcombe's Story Books.
"Well-constructed and readable.. they provide a useful stepping-stone to the adult fiction of Daphne de Maurier, Mary Stewart and other writers of this kind.
"[4]In addition to Dragon Summer, Arthur's other time-slip titles include A Candle in Her Room, Requiem for a Princess, and On the Wasteland.
[15] In Miss Ghost, Arthur's final novel, the protagonist Elphie has to overcome isolation brought on by distance in her immediate family.
[16][17] In her most popular books, the ones for young adults, Arthur tended to use the first-person narrative a great deal, relaying events from the viewpoint of the focal character or protagonist as they interact with the world around them.
[15] The settings of her books for young adults often have historical backgrounds and are places that Arthur was intimately familiar with.
Many of her stories for young adults shared similar themes and intertwined history, time, and old objects.
[5] The two main types of books in this series are the timeslip books, which "typically feature a teenage girl on the verge of adolescence, a crisis dramatically resolved through her absorption in an earlier, exemplary life-situation;" and her ghost stories, "in which the process is reversed: Ghosts visit girls in trouble and offer solutions".
Her stories, where a preteen girl trips into another (historic) world where a character is experiencing a similar but more extreme situation, are so convincing that I couldn’t sleep with them in my room.
"[21] Requiem for a Princess was included as a Library of Congress Children's Literature Center Book, in the category of 'Stories for Older Boys and Girls', 1967.
[24] Works published in the United States as of 1973 included Dragon Summer; My Daughter, Nicola; A Candle in Her Room, Requiem for a Princess, Portrait of Margarita, The Whistling Boy, The Saracen Lamp, and The Little Dark Thorn.