The writer Naomi Royde-Smith wrote a book, Love in Mildensee, in 1948, whose main character, Annette Willoughby, was based on Austin.
[1] She had a well off family and did not appear to work until 1906 when she applied for a job at the Incorporated National Lending Library for the Blind.
[2] Ethel Austin's earliest proposals of 1911 for the amalgamation of small libraries for the blind into one centralised system proved abortive.
She gave talks at national conferences and from 1913 she wrote regularly for Librarian and Book World.
[2] Austin died in Fitzroy Square in 1918 from appendicitis which thwarted her plans to marry Louis Stanley Jast.