 During World War I, she worked in the munitions industry.After the war, she returned to her native Halifax where she taught English and Latin.In 1918, she published her first work, a collection of short stories entitled "The World's Bane", after which she published several poor-selling novels until the publication in March 1932 of her best-known work, "Inheritance", set against the background of the development of the textile industry in the West Riding, which received widespread critical acclaim and ran through twenty-three impressions by 1946, making her the first successful English regional novelist since Thomas Hardy had written his Wessex novels.