Background
She was from an Irish Roman Catholic family
She was from an Irish Roman Catholic family
Eileen went to primary school at Tuamarina, and from 1907, after winning a Junior National Scholarship, attended Marlborough High School until 1910. After returning to Tuamarina primary school as a pupil-teacher in 1912–13, she went to Teachers' Training College, Wellington.
In 1918 she began teaching at Dannevirke High School, but ill health forced her to abandon her intended career. From 1919 onwards she supported herself mostly by her writing, although she was awarded a state pension by the first Labour government in August 1942.
By 1931 she had acquired a considerable reputation as a writer. She was a regular publisher of historical and critical material, short stories, and a weekly column, ‘The Catholic Woman’, in the New Zealand Tablet, under the pen-name Pippa, begun in 1927. It was as Pippa that she was perhaps best known within the New Zealand Catholic community; she was also much sought after as the author of occasional verses to celebrate significant events within the life of the church, and did much in her prose writing to support the work of religious congregations and charitable institutions. As an essayist and occasional journalist, she published in the Sun, the Press (Christchurch), the Bulletin (Sydney), the New English Weekly (London), and Commonweal (New York).