On 14 October 1881, she joined textual scholar Frederick J. Furnivall's New Shakspere Society.

[4] Her 1883 three-scene prototype of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet created a prescient solution for offering parallel views of multiple textual versions; textual scholar Ann Thompson writes of this prototype that "the sample demonstrates that, once completed, Teena Rochfort Smith's edition would have been the most complex presentation of the texts of Hamlet ever attempted".

[5] This Four-Text 'Hamlet' in Parallel Columns prototype was intended to provide diplomatic transcriptions of Hamlet's first and second quartos (Q1, Q2), first folio (F1), plus Rochfort-Smith's own old-spelling edition based on Q2 but also pulling from F1.

The edition employed six varieties of typeface, four inks, three kinds of underlining, and daggers, asterisks, and other symbols call out variants and the extent of variance.

[5] On 28 August 1883, Rochfort-Smith's dress and petticoats caught on fire due to a faulty match as she was burning some correspondence.