She published her first novel at the age of 40. The grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, she began her writing career after the death of her father in 1869 and emigrated to England after the death of her mother. There she published several novels, including Rodman the Keeper (1880), Anne (1881), For the Major (1883), and Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1886). Her relationship with Henry James remained as mysterious as the exact circumstances of her death: she fell from the window of her fourth-floor flat in Venice.