June Rose spent five years exploring the private world of Dr Barnardo's, matching archive material with the memories of staff and children which is documented in her book For the Sake of the Children. Her first excursion into the charitable world, Changing Focus, was written to mark the centenary of the R.N.I.B. Since then her two acclaimed biographies, The Perfect Gentleman, the life of James Miranda Barry, a nineteenth-century woman doctor who masqueraded for forty years as a man, and Elizabeth Fry, the life of the Quaker prison reformer, reflect her concern with social questions.