When Susan's father died, her family, consisting of her mother, sister and brother, relocated to England, where she was educated.

[2] Using this experience, Susan established Hope's first school with her mother, and subsequently married John Fall Allison, one of the founders of what is now Princeton, British Columbia, in 1868.

The couple, aided by John's knowledge of Chinook Jargon, a trade language, as a result of his previous marriage to an Indigenous woman, became close with nearby First Nations populations.

[3] In 1891, an ethnographic paper of Allison's was published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and another in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

[3] In her final years she was forced to gradually return to urban life, first moving back to Hope and then to Vancouver in 1928, where she died on February 1, 1937.