 Rawsthorne's closest wartime friends appear to have been John Rayner (typographer, journalist and soldier (SOE), the photographer Joan Leigh Fermor (then Rayner), the Schiaparelli model, Anna Phillips, and the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, but her social life encompassed many others including the poets Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas (with whom she shared working quarters), Ian Fleming and old friends from Paris, Peter Rose-Pulham, Peter Watson (editor of the journal "Horizon") and the spy Donald Maclean

Returning to Paris in 1945, Rawsthorne was re-united with Giacometti and lived with him for a short while, but they never married.She continued to be involved in the evolution of the figurative style associated with Existentialism.She socialised with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl, etc., and for a time lived a few doors away from the headquarters of the journal "Les Temps Modernes".