She and her sister Eleanor were brought up at Adderbury House, where they lived with the mistress, mother and grandmother of its owner, the poet and libertine John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who was Anne Wharton's uncle.

The poet Robert Gould in an eclogue to the memory of Eleanor, who died in 1691, observes that her own was a peaceful one by comparison: "Think how her sister, dear 'Urania' [i. e. Anne], fell, When ev'ry Arte'ry, Fibre, Nerve and Vein Were by Convulsions torn, and fill'd with Pain..."[3] After her death, her brother-in-law, Goodwin Wharton claimed in his autobiography to have had an affair with her, and alleged that she had had three other affairs – with Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough before her marriage (ostensibly bribing a servant to let him into the girl's room at night) and with "Jack Howe" (probably the Whig politician John Grubham Howe, 1657–1722)[4] in the 1680s – as well as being "lain with long by her uncle, my Lord Rochester."

[5] Wharton is remembered today for the verse drama Love's Martyr; or, Witt above Crowns, and for a number of lyrical poems and biblical paraphrases,[6] but all that was published in her lifetime was a heartfelt elegy on Rochester's death, under the pseudonym Urania.

[7] Behn's was a verse-letter addressed to Anne, included in her 1684 Poems on Several Occasions, in which she took the opportunity of defending herself from a charge of bawdiness brought by the future bishop Gilbert Burnet, who had attended Rochester on his deathbed.

[8] A modern critical edition of 34 known works by Anne Wharton appeared in 1997,[9] but at least eleven other poems have been discovered in manuscript since then.