In 1885, having completed her education, Kelley-Hawkins worked as a schoolteacher. While doing this, at the age of twenty-eight, she published her first novel, Megda (1891), under the pseudonym "Forget-Me-Not." Not long after, on July 14, 1892, she married a civil engineer, Benjamin Arnon Hawkins. In the years 1894 and 1897, they had two daughters, Gala and Megda. Between this time, in 1895, Kelley-Hawkins published her second and final novel, Four Girls at Cottage City.
