[1][2] Amy Geertruida de Leeuw was born at the family home alongside the Nieuwe Gracht in Haarlem, the oldest of her parents' four children.

Her mother was Maria Cornelia Elisabeth Penninck Hoofd (1815/1816–1876), half-niece (following the re-marriage of Geertruida's widowed grandmother) of the landscape architect Louis Paul Zocher, and a professional translator of English provenance.

Johan Carel de Leeuw (1816–1880), her father, was a water engineer who was in charge of the draining of the Anna Paulownapolder north of Alkmaar.

In 1848 the company that had been set up to drain the Anna Paulownapolder filed for bankruptcy and her father lost a large part of his savings and the handsome salary which he had hitherto earned.

This was encouraged by her step-grandfather (her grandmother's second husband), the landscape architect who lived nearby and gave her access to a piece of land where she could create and develop a little garden of her own.

After the family relocated, in 1855, she frequently accompanied her father on the walks he took in the course of his work, to inspect the conditions of dikes that drained and protected the Anna Paulownapolder.

[3][a] Along with Henriëtte van der Meij, de Leeuw came from the first generation of women few of whom turned to journalism as a way to earn a living: she was acutely aware of being a woman in a man's world.

Initially her contributions appeared simply under the by-line, "from a country girl" ("... een landmeisje"), but she was told she should use a name, so chose the pseudonym George Zeemeeuw.

[2] She became a regular contributor to the Nieuws van den Dag in 1881 when the paper published the first in her series of ten lengthy, readable and scholarly pieces on "botanical city walks",[4] in which she demonstrated literary talent and a botanical knowledge that was both broad and deep, evidently acquired from her mother's kinsman, the landscape architect Louis Paul Zocher.

There was no preliminary requirement to study for any sort of diploma, but she evidently brought commitment and energy to her hospital training and duties, possibly supported by the experience gained looking after her own parents during their final years.

[2] Her English kinsfolk appear to have moved in politically left-wing circles: life in London made a deep impression on her still youthfully receptive soul.

[5][8] in 1893 she accepted membership of the Leiden-based Dutch Literary Society ("Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde"/ MNL) which had, up till this point, been an all-male association.