Her father, Count Károly Zichy de Zich et Vásonkeő (1785–1876) served as an imperial and royal chamberlain and was a landowner.

Her maternal grandparents were Count János Nepomuk Battyhány de Németújvár (1745–1831), a landowner, and Countess Maria Johanna Antonia zu Herberstein (1766–1838).

Countess Zichy married Count Lajos Battyhány de Németújvár on 4 December 1834, in Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia).

She only returned ten years later, for a Requiem that the Hungarian youth organised to remember Battyhány, who was secretly buried in the walls of the crypt of the Franciscan church in Pest and only received a funeral and official burial in 1870.

On 13 March 1862, she and Emília Csernovics, widow of János Damjanich, a martyr of Arad, founded the Association of Hungarian Housewives.