Claiming an old family name, D. Manners-Sutton's work was published in the Australasian, the Sydney Mail, the Tasmanian Mail and the Sunraysia Daily. In 1925 Manners-Sutton left Australia to work in South Africa for the United Tobacco Company and here she continued to have her stories published locally in newspapers. Her African experiences provided inspiration for her two novels Black Gold (1934) and The Last Secret (1939).
Leaving Africa for London in 1928 she worked for the Morning Post and travelled to Europe studying in Paris, Vienna and Italy and continued to publish short stories. In 1934 in Libya, she married Salvatore Gentile, a draughtsman in the Italian army. After the breakup of her marriage during World War Two she survived with her children in Civiglio near the Swiss border. Often destitute and lacking real means of support during and after the war, her income was supplemented by various means, including loans from her friend, Ella McFadyen. She regained her British nationality and was repatriated to England in 1946.
She later emigrated to Canada where a friend had organized an editorial position for her with Longmans Green and Company, Toronto. As this position did not prove satisfactory she returned to London, finally following her children and settling in Sydney in 1970.
Manners-Sutton's passion for a life of adventure and travel is reflected in a fragment from her unpublished diary: 'If I have done nothing else with my life, I at least have made of it something fantastique like a fairy story'.
(Manner-Sutton is variously represented as Doris Gentile in other reference sources including the Australian Dictionary of Biography.)
