She studied under F. McGillivray Knowles at his Bloor Street Studio and at the Central Technical School, Toronto. She became a teacher at Alma College and in 1931 married F. McGillivray Knowles. She continued to teach at Alma College for thirty years and to remain in the community of St. Thomas. Her husband died in 1932.
During the summers she made sketching trips to Colpoy's Bay near the Owen Sound area of Ontario and exhibited her work there in 1937. She also exhibited her paintings at The Robert Simpson Company Ltd., Toronto (1944) with the work of F. McGillivray Knowles and Elizabeth Knowles, at Alma College (1946) when the St. Thomas “Times-Journal”noted “The Canadian scene has a gifted exponent in Mrs. Knowles—not the stark and the bleak and forbidding aspects of the country's landscape (and it has those), but its beauty, its glorious colour, its strength, its exquisite and its comfortable, homely aspects.This exhibition of over fifty pictures portrays them in all seasons os the year—comfortable farm homes, winding country roads, orchards in blossom time, the woods in maple sugar time, in deep winter, in summer and in fall, the fields in the ploughing season and at harvest. Many of the pictures have been painted on the shores of Northern Ontario's lovely blue lakes, where silver birches make a fairy land of the scene, and many portray this immediate district. There are several marines also, one large one showing the sea with the fog creeping in towards shore. And there are a number of interesting flower studies, which have their own appeal.”
She also painted at Cape Breton Island where she did marine studies which were exhibited in 1951 at The Little Gallery, Toronto. Since then she has held a number of exhibitions at her own home in St. Thomas also at the offices of the Ontario Loan and Debenture Company, St. Thomas (1967) when twenty-five of her paintings were exhibited to mark the anniversary of that company's establishment in the St. Thomas area.
Source: "A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume I: A-F", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1977
