Convent educated in Lourdes, she converted to Catholicism and embarked on a literary career. She was a successful London and New York playwright who enjoyed considerable literary acclaim in the first decades of the 20th century. In 1911, under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan, she published "The Dop Doctor", which was made into a film in 1915 by Fred Paul. The film gave considerable offence in South Africa because if its harsh portrayal of English and Dutch characters. It was eventually banned under the Defence of the Realm Act. The story's protagonist is a drunken and disgraced doctor who eventually makes his way to South Africa where he redeems his honour at the siege of Mafeking. Albert Gérard, in his "European-language writing in Sub Saharan Africa" , regards the book's description of the siege of Mafeking "as a heroic justification of British Imperial strategy and the vindication of a belief in the righteousness and superiority of the British cause. The Dop Doctor contains pro-Jingo arguments of the type which offers the stereotypical portrait of the Boer as backward and despicably primitive, and the black man as a shadow figure behind the civilising foreground, an appendage of an argument over what to do with his labour". "Between Two Thieves" and "One Braver Thing" followed in 1914.