By the time she was ten years old, both her parents and her eldest sister had died, and she was living in the care of an aunt and under the guardianship of an uncle, first in Switzerland, then in Paris, and finally in London.

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was a visiting physician there[2] and Charles Dickens publicized the Heckfords' work in two chapters titled "A Small Star in the East".

[1] She set off to travel after hospital business was settled, first to Naples (where her daughter married), then to India, where she worked as an informal medical missionary treating women (see Zenana mission).

[1] She spent her later years in South Africa, starting a new farm in Soutpansberg, and trying her hand at gold mining (the subject of her next book, True Transvaal Tales).

She went back to governess work in the late 1890s, and as a harmless-seeming sixty-year-old lady, carried messages for the English during the South African War.