[1] Her childhood was spent in the borders, but in 1799 she travelled to India,[2] where on 29 April at Fort George, Madras she married her cousin Gilbert Geddes Richardson, a mariner, captain of an East Indiaman and partner in a trading house, Colt, Baker, Hart & Co.[3] Her connection with India is specified as her uncle, 'General, afterwards Lord Harris'.

'[4][5] Richardson's first-published work is thought to be the 1801 four-volume novel Adonia - A Desultory Story; her authorship rests on strong circumstantial evidence - the published volumes omits the author's name.

[2] Henry Colburn's The New Monthly Magazine, in a review of Poems, speculated that the two were related;[6] David Richardson was an East India Company officer, on furlough to the UK during the LWR period.

[2] It was reviewed with considerable scorn in The Edinburgh Literary Journal: 'How Mrs. G. G. Richardson took it into her head to publish a volume of "Poems" is a good deal more than we can understand...';[8] and more blandly in The Athenaeum as a work of 'chasteness ... of thought and language, pleasing and appropriate similes, natural metaphors and very gentle pathos ... [with] a vein of melancholy running through the whole.

[2] Chambers's Journal commented in 1876 that Richardson was in the class of 'forgotten or little known poets', and opines that her work 'is not characterised by striking originality of thought', but 'clear and pure, sometimes sparking, more frequently soft and gentle'.