Born in Malawi, she attended The Mount School, York, and read English literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford.
She received a DPhil on Henry James and Freud from Sussex University.
She taught English literature at Reading University for ten years, leaving in 2005 to become a full-time writer.
From 2016 until 2021 she taught creative writing and English literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.
[5] Wilson was the Jean Strouse Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers[6] at the New York Public Library from 2018 to 2019, where she worked on a biography of D. H. Lawrence, which was published by FSG in America and by Bloomsbury Circus in the UK in 2021.