The year 1946 began promisingly with the première of Maconchy's Theme and Variations for String Orchestra (1942–3), which was featured in a Radio Éireann symphony concert broadcast on 13 January. In May, the Americanborn organist Virginie Zinke-Bianchini included one of Maconchy's works in a concert held at her home in Paris on the 18th, providing a boost for Maconchy's career in Europe after the war. October saw a performance of The Voice of the City in a studio recital arranged by the Committee for the Promotion of New Music (CPNM), and on 27 November, Maconchy's Viola Sonata was included in a BBC Midlands Home Service broadcast. Maconchy's isolation from London briefly seemed poised to come to an end when she and her husband began searching for homes in Hampstead and Highgate. For whatever reason, they abandoned this idea in favour of remaining in Essex. Maconchy celebrated when she learned that she was pregnant with her second child, Nicola, who was born on 28 April 1947. Despite all this good news, she was dissatisfied with her own works during this period as she detailed in a letter to Williams in March 1946:

While one can point to a multitude of factors that posed challenges for Maconchy during this period, such as her reputation as a ‘modernist’ composer, her continued isolation from London, as well as the inherent challenges of balancing motherhood and a career, there were also broader shifts in the postwar music scene that made re-establishing her expanding pre-war reputation a daunting, if not insurmountable, task. Much had changed within the music profession during the war, and despite any appearances to the contrary, there was a great deal of continuity from the late 1930s that spilled into the ways in which decisions were made in the initial post-war years.