Mary Edith Boothby Howitt was the granddaughter of prominent Victorian author and poet Mary Botham Howitt, whose husband William Howitt came to Australia in 1852 to make his fortune on the Victorian Goldfields (but returned to England in 1854) and the daughter of Alfred William Howitt, son of Mary Botham Howitt, who arrived in Australia with his father in 1852 and remained to become a prominent geologist, anthropologist, and explorer.

Howitt was not a prolific author, but contributed some non-fiction, including travel sketches (travels seemingly undertaken in company with her father and other family members), to newspapers such as The Leader. Her only fiction appears to be the short story 'The Lost White Woman': no further publications have been traced.

During World War I, Howitt was still living at 'Eastwood', her father Alfred's farm in Bairnsdale (Eastwood is now a suburb of Bairnsdale), from which place she wrote to the local newspapers seeking assistance in such war work as making milk-jug covers for the hospitals in Egypt and subscriptions for ambulances. From references in contemporary newspapers, she was a keen and active guardian of her family's history in both Australia and England, reading at least one paper relating to her family's Melbourne branch in front of the Victorian Historical Society ('A Notable Family'); it was later published in the September 1913 edition of the Victorian Historical Magazine. As late as the 1930s, she was correcting the public record on her grandfather's contribution to Charles Dickens' papers and Charles Read's novels ('The Squatter Papers') and on her father's contributions to colonial exploration of Australia ('Historic Homes of Victoria').

A number of Mary Botham Howitt's works appeared in Australian newspapers and magazines in the nineteenth century, which can cause confusion with her granddaughter.