As a young woman she wrote a manuscript about a lesbian girl called "Amelia", based on her own teenager years and an affair with another girl, but the novel was later lost and never published. Her best-selling book "Harriet the Spy", about a tomboyish 11-year-old, met with controversy in the 1960s, prompting some schools to ban it from their libraries. "Harriet" is now regarded as a children's classic.