Leaving rural East Anglia for Art School in swinging-sixties London, by 1969 Maggie was working as a fashion designer, illustrator and copywriter. Discovering the fashion world was not for her, approaching The Save the Children Fund, she spent several years in the paediatric infectious diseases unit of a London teaching hospital, until, after designing a series of successful posters for the Health Education Council, in 1979, she left to freelance as a children’s book illustrator and writer.

Drawn to the adult world of cartoons, she was a finalist in The Sunday Times International Cartoon Competition 1983, was published in Women Draw 1984 (Women’s Press 1984), and her debut collection One Woman’s Eye (Virgin Books) came out in 1986, her work soon appearing in books, magazines and newspapers, including the The Guardian and The Observer, as well as in publications in the US and Italy. Her winning cartoons on the property boom for The New Statesman International Cartoon Competition were published in Ouch! (New Statesman Ltd 1998).  And she was later invited to contribute to The Inking Woman: British Women and comic artists exhibition at The Cartoon Museum (26/4-23/7 2017); the subsequent book published by Myriad Editions (2018). Two other late cartoons were critiqued by the author of UK Cartoons and Comics: a critical survey (Palgrave Macmillan 2019)

In 2002, swapping dip pen for iMac to work with words alone, she moved to the Suffolk coast. But missing urban life, in 2014, relocated to the smaller city of Norwich, a UNESCO City of literature.

Concentrating on the short form, her work has been placed in numerous competitions. Cold Snap, her one-and-only ghost story, was published in Something Was There: Asham Award-winning ghost stories (Virago 2011). Elsewhere, stories appeared in Unthology 1 (Unthank Books 2010), Unthology 5 (2014), while Let Her Go was a Seren Short Story of the Month (serenbooks.com 10/2017) and her nineteen-story collection Appetites: stories of love, sex and death was published by Matador (2019). Bridport-shortlisted Bird Brains was selected for The Fairlight Book of Short Stories: vol 1 (Fairlight Books 2020), others long and shortlisted, including Carpe Diem, longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2021, Rosa Felicia, longlisted for the Bridport Prize 2022, The Last Time I Saw Richard, shortlisted for the 2024 Fish Short Story Prize, and Rosa Felicia making the Fish shortlist in 2025.