She was part of the modernist movement in Canadian poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, one of only a few prominent women poets of the time, along with Dorothy Livesay and P. K. Page.

The middle child of Mary Osler and lawyer George Gibbons, she grew up in privileged society in London, Ontario[3] and, after her father's early death from multiple sclerosis in 1919, in Toronto and California, and at her grandfather's country estate at Roches Point on Lake Simcoe.

[5] She also published two books of prose before her untimely death from lung cancer in 1961: Lions in the Way (1956), a history of her maternal family, the Oslers, and Swann and Daphne (1960), a modern fairy tale for children.

Her close friend A. J. M. Smith edited and introduced The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir, which was posthumously published in 1968.

[8] Her writing was celebrated by artist/filmmaker Joyce Wieland and author Michael Ondaatje, and set to music by composer Oskar Morawetz.