Mary Kelly's proclamation of optimism in the face of uncertainty arises out of the complex background of political turmoil and social upheaval in England that she found concentrated in the rural hamlet of Kelly that she called home. Indeed, her description of the place as one marked by a mere ‘uncertainty’ might stand as a moderating revision, given the evidence of precipitous decline discovered in the history of rural England from the 1870s to the interwar years. Kelly's contrasting optimism – even writing under the looming threat of a second world war – is situated in a rural arts context she finds filled with potential. Conceived out of such confidence, Kelly's development of the rural arts theatre ‘was perceived and practised as a privileged means to regenerate village life’, going beyond the duty to service inherited from her family's class and church background to incorporate the legacy of increasing democratisation after the Great War. Since the Victorian era, rural life had been increasingly shaped by literacy education, the development of widely available print culture and the encroachment of the industrialised city, all of which would threaten existent rural mores. At the same time, many working people – urban, suburban and rural – enjoyed increased leisure time and responded to a national political discourse urging them to seek out more social autonomy. Some did so by pursuing new cultural activities and altering traditions of performance. Although the entrenched class privileges of a previous age allowed Kelly's rural arts scheme to take flight, it was ultimately the interwar developments of increased education and independence of the working classes that allowed it to flourish. However much Kelly understood her climate as one of disruption and uncertainty, her work demonstrates a confidence that the changes wrought by modernity brought increased opportunities for rural performance.

Where scholars of literature make mention of Kelly, it is usually as a purported model for the character of Miss La Trobe, the rather eccentric playwright and director in Virginia Woolf's posthumous novel Between the Acts (1941), or as a collaborator with better-known figures like Vita Sackville-West and E. M. Forster.