Her father was a chemist who was interested in photography and antiquarianism and her brother was the war poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.

Elizabeth appears to have been bisexual and later that year she became engaged to marry William Henry Phelps who was also a poet.

[4] Elizabeth Gibson had published about twenty books of poetry or prose and she was an established writer.

[3] Their common interest fueled a whirlwind romance that resulted in their marriage in the Cornish village of Mawnan in Cornwall on 28 August 1911.

Afterwards she joined Cheyne at his home in Oxford where they worked together actively supporting the suffrage hunger strikers and calls for peace with Germany.