She took issue with Darwin's description of the Tuco-tuco in his "Journal of Researches" (1839). While Darwin had suggested that the Tuco-tuco were nocturnal creatures that lived almost entirely underground, Lady Dixie had seen the Tuco-tuco out during the daytime. She sent Darwin a copy of "Across Patagonia"; Darwin's copy of this book is part of the Library of Charles Darwin located in the Rare Books Room of Cambridge University Library. When she returned from Patagonia, Dixie brought home with her a jaguar, which she called Affums and kept as a pet. Affums killed several deer in Windsor Great Park and had to be sent to a zoo. A hotel at Puerto Natales in the Chilean part of Patagonia is named the "Hotel Lady Florence Dixie" in her honor. Her experiences in Patagonia inspire much of her later work, both her writing for children, and her work with the women's suffrage movement. Her two children's books, "The Young Castaways" and its sequel "Aniwee", are set in Patagonia and depict strong female characters. In 1881, Dixie was appointed as a field correspondent of the "Morning Post" of London to cover the First Boer War (1880–1881) and the aftermath of the Anglo-Zulu War. She and her husband traveled to South Africa together. In Cape Town, she stayed with the Governor of the Cape Colony. She visited Zululand, and on her return interviewed the Zulu king Cetshwayo, being held in detention by the British. Her reports, followed by her "A Defence of Zululand and Its King from the Blue Book" (1882) and "In the Land of Misfortune" (1882), were instrumental in Cetshwayo's brief restoration to his throne in 1883. In Dixie's "In the Land of Misfortune", there is a struggle between her individualism and her identification with the power of the British Empire, but for all of her sympathy with the Zulu cause and with Cetshwayo, she remained at heart an imperialist. Dixie held strong views on the emancipation of women, proposing that the sexes should be equal in marriage and divorce, that the Crown should be inherited by the monarch's oldest child, regardless of sex, and even that men and women should wear the same clothes. She was a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and her obituary in the "Englishwoman's Review" emphasized her support for the cause of women's suffrage (i.e. the right to vote): "Lady Florence... threw herself eagerly into the Women's Movement, and spoke on public platforms."