In 1928 she married George Ivon Woodham-Smith, a distinguished London solicitor with whom she had an exceptionally close and deep relationship until his death in 1968. But although she possessed a gift for historical writing, she postponed her career (as was customary for women of her time) until her two children had gone off to boarding school. In the meantime, she wrote pot-boilers under the pseudonym Janet Gordon; this training was to stand her in good stead as an historian, as she mastered the art of writing entertaining narrative.