In 1928, while a journalist with the Sun News-Pictorial, she submitted her play, The Touch of Silk, to Frank D Clewlow who later that year had it staged by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre at the Playhouse, Melbourne. It was subsequently performed by amateur groups in Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney but unfortunately, despite favourable notices, it was not seen as commercially viable and she lost interest in further writing for the stage and concentrated on romantic novels and children's books.
But Clewlow had not forgotten The Touch of Silk. When he was transferred to Sydney as head of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Federal Drama Department in 1938, he used his influence to have it produced in Melbourne by John Cairns and in Sydney in 1942 by Charles Wheeler starring Neva Carr Glynn, and it has subsequently been published in book form. She wrote one more play for ABC Radio: Daddy Was Asleep in 1945.
Finally, in 1975, The Touch of Silk was produced for the commercial stage by John Tasker, starring Fay Kelton and a substantial supporting cast. It had had been a long wait, forty-seven years, with public interest kept alive by radio productions.
She married Ellis Harvey Davies in 1923 but left him for wealthy Marxist intellectual Guido Baracchi in 1932. They spent 1933—34 in Russia, where she worked on the Moscow Daily News, sharing a room with Katharine Susannah Prichard. On their return to Australia, they moved to Sydney, building a house in Castlecrag before she left him (and the Communist Party) in 1939. She moved to London with daughter in 1952 to write then returned to Sydney around 1962, living in an artists' colony at Montsalvat, the subject of her 1972 book The Eye of the Beholder. She helped found the (leftwing) New Theatre League. She was a founding member of the Australian Society of Authors and a member of its management committee for much of the time before 1993 when she was made an honorary life member.
