There is a story that Oscar Wilde, a friend and correspondent, proposed to her in Dublin in 1879;[4] the significance of this event requires her to have been old enough to become engaged, leading to change her birth date to 1862 (not 1866 as often given).

Among her lovers were Somerset Maugham and H. G. Wells, though her longest affair was with the married Hueffer, who lived with her from about 1910 to 1918 at her home South Lodge (a period including his eight-day 1911 imprisonment for refusal to pay his wife for the support of their two daughters).

[6] She was fictionalised by him in two novels: as the scheming Florence Dowell in The Good Soldier and as the promiscuous Sylvia Tietjens in his tetralogy Parade's End.

She was also the inspiration for the character Rose Waterfield in Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence and Norah Nesbit in Of Human Bondage.

[8] Tales of the Uneasy was described by E. F. Bleiler as containing "Excellent stories, in which the supernatural is used as a technical device to indicate ironies of fate and the intimate relationship of life and death.