She was born at Terras, St Stephen-in-Brannel, Cornwall, to James Hocking, a mine agent, and his wife Elizabeth (née Kitto).
Her father turned to farming because of a decline in the mining industry and, one day in her teens, while helping out pitching corn sheaves, she seriously injured her spine.
During the 1880s she produced five novels in quick succession - Granny's Hero (1885); The Fortunes of Riverside or Waiting and Winning (1885); Norah Lang (1886); Jacky (1887) and Chronicles of a Quiet Family (1888).
[2] She taught at the village school in nearby Coombe, was involved with the United Methodist church at St Stephen-in-Brannel as an organist and choir leader, and also sang contralto in a chapel quartet which travelled around Cornwall.
It was through her husband's literary social circle that she met such people as George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) and Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902).
[5] In 1909 the couple moved to a small house on the Smitham Downs at Coulsdon in Surrey which Hocking chose to name Trenowth Cottage after the woods near to her family home in Cornwall.
[6] During the First World War she was a member of the Coulsdon Women War-Work Party, spending much of her time knitting items such as mufflers and bedsocks for the men at the front.
[7] When Hocking was well enough to entertain, the house was open to large numbers friends and acquaintances, including those connected with various Tolstoyan groups.