Nell is a very much a busybody: she is interfering, nosy and always gossiping. She is frosty and old-fashioned as she does not like to be called by her first name. She constantly spies on her Neighbours and tells tales about them. She insists she is a good Christian woman. She constantly moans and whines throughout her time in the serial. She has also been portrayed as fending off other characters if they tried to be nice to her. It was the mixture of all these traits that allow Nell to become one of the most hated soap characters of her time. In the "Neighbours" twentieth anniversary book Nell is described as being "the Ramsay Street gossip, the Queen Bee of the cul-de-sac, and her constant interfering in the affairs of her neighbours did not always endear her to the street". Upon her departure, behind the scenes scriptwriters decided to give Nell a pleasant exit plot, seeing Nell finally finding happiness.