[1] Unable to reconcile her memories with the post-war reality, or identify with the nationalist aims of the country, within a year, Groag returned to London, where her mother had remained.

[1][3] Sidelined until 1950 by illness,[1] in the second half of that year Groag married Alfred E. Barrington in Chelsea and moved to the United States in October.

[1][5] She applied for Stanford's PhD program but was denied entry because she was too old and instead earned a master's degree in history from Santa Clara University in 1970.

[5] Centering her talks around images she had organized into a slide projection show, Bell's lectures used a wide range of source materials from medieval manuscript illuminations to gardening imagery[9] to demonstrate women's work, status, and roles in society over time.

[1] In 1982, Bell published Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture in Signs.

In the article, she argued that noble women in medieval society, operating within their own socially defined roles became catalysts for cultural change, through their relationship to books.

[1] Published in 1983, the work presented translated documents related to the debates that occurred in the period on whether women should lead public or traditional lives.

In 1986 she co-edited with Marilyn Yalom, Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender[1] and in 1991, wrote her own memoir, Between Worlds: Czechoslovakia, England, and America.

[21] In 2017, the Association of Art Historians hosted a conference in the UK at Loughborough University to evaluate the legacy of Bell's Medieval Women Book Owners, thirty-five years after its initial publication.