Novelist, translator, and travel writer, Plumptre was part of the late eighteenth-century Norwich dissenting community. She authored several novels, with Something New, or, Adventures at Campbell-house (1801) now the best remembered. A Narrative of a Three Years' Residence in France (1810) is the publication that did the most for her fame. She also published Musaeus's Physiognomical Travels, Preceded by a Physiognomical Journal (1800), her translation of Johann Karl August Musäus's anonymously published Physiognomische Reisen, voran ein physiognomisch Tagebuch (1778-1779), a satire of the work of Johann Kaspar Lavater.