Hopkins published comparatively little under her own name, and the little she did publish is dense, allusive and hard to use as an introduction. Her teaching happened in the room, in twelve lesson courses given orally to students who then went away and wrote the books. The consequence is that she is the least visible important figure in the history of the movement, and that histories written from printed sources tend to leap from Quimby and Eddy to Unity and Religious Science without her in between.
Her theology drew the movement away from Christian Science in a definite direction. Where Eddy held to a closed system with a single authorised text, Hopkins read widely and taught a comparative frame, drawing on scripture, on Hindu material, and on whatever she judged to be describing the same thing. She emphasised the indwelling divine in every person and, in her later work, a doctrine of the Holy Spirit as the age now beginning, which gave her students a warrant for teaching independently rather than reproducing a founder.
She withdrew from institutional work around the turn of the century and taught privately in New York until her death in 1925. Her last well known student, taught late and privately, was Ernest Holmes.