In 1889, Mara married French lawyer Charles Lenger-Marlet. They travelled extensively, including to North Africa and a number of Mediterranean islands. She shared her impressions from these travels with readers of different French newspapers and journals, including Nouvelle revue. Her contemporaries particularly admired her ethnographic studies on the Sinti and Romani people, for which she was appointed honorary correspondence member of the Gypsy Lore Society. Following the death of her first husband she moved to Graz and in 1894 she married Hugo von Berks, landowner and member of the Austrian Imperial Council, with whom she had a son. Her home in Vienna was one of few political salons at the time, and she found material for her work also behind the scenes of parliamentary life. The family lived in Blagovna mansion near Šentjur in Styria. After her husband’s death in 1906 she moved to Gorizia, where she died of tuberculosis in 1910. She wrote novels, dramas, the libretto for the opera Princesa Vrtavka (The giddy princess) by Josip Ipavec, and translated theatre plays. She was especially interested in south Slavic, African, and Romani women, and wrote about them in her ethnographic studies. In her novel Grešnica (Sinner), the love story takes place in Vienna and a small provincial town of Styria, but at the time Gorizia was no metropolis either:

“As soon as he set foot in the small town he felt the overwhelming feeling of unease that comes upon anyone who arrives in a small town from a big city. There is no fast mail, no electric lights, magazines are from yesterday, and people try to appear important in ridiculous events. Even a dog circus is a big event here.” (Die Sünderin)