Francis Lathom was born on 14 July 1774, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where his father, Henry, conducted business for the East India Company and returning to England around 1777, settling near Norwich.
Lathom's first novel, The Castle of Ollada (1795) was published in two volumes, anonymously, by William Lane's Minerva Press.
Although Lathom would occasionally employ bloody and horrific scenes reminiscent of M. G. Lewis, he typically followed Radcliffe's method of the "explained supernatural."
In 1797 he married Diana Ganning, daughter of a wealthy Norfolk lawyer, and the pair had four children, three of which survived, a baby boy dying in infancy.
He did separate from his wife shortly after this however and was given two thousand pounds a year in his father's will on condition that he break all ties with his children.
He also travelled in France and Italy, eventually settling in rural Scotland with the Rennie family, where he died in Aberdeenshire in 1832.