Training in librarianship, her application for a post at Southampton University was thwarted by a pilfering office boy who destroyed her letter.
She later ascribed this disaster to divine providence, as it led to a job in the University of Hull, where she explored her growing sense of a vocation to religious life.
The outbreak of World War II necessitated the temporary evacuation of St. Mary's Convent, Hampstead, where she was teaching, to the East Sussex mansion of Lady Catherine Ashburnham.
She wrote numerous sketches of school and convent life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the Catholic Record Society.
[citation needed] She died, aged 96, on the feast-day of Saint Margaret Clitherow, like Ward and Kirkus, a Yorkshirewoman, whose relics are kept in the Bar Convent chapel.