In 1880 she made her London stage debut at the Opera Comique, joining the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and creating the role of Mabel for the London production of "The Pirates of Penzance". According to her colleague Rutland Barrington, Hood was "a perfect picture to look at and equally pleasant to listen to ... tall, slight, and graceful, a typical English girl with a wealth of fair hair, which I believe was all her own. Her singing of the waltz song, 'Poor Wandering One', was quite one of the features of the first act "Pirates"." "The New York Times" wrote that she had "a soprano voice of rare flexibility and power."