She attended Nottingham Girls' High School and then read English at St. Anne's College, Oxford University.
She worked as a journalist in 1952–1962, notably for House and Garden and the Sunday Times, and then became a full-time writer, while continuing to write freelance press reviews.
Secret Places (1981) was set in a girls' boarding school during World War II, and The Country of Her Dreams (1982) in a Balkan city picked to house a nuclear bunker for European art.
[6][5] The King Awakes and The Empty Throne, 1987 and 1988 novels illustrated by Grahame Baker, form an "Arthurian sequence for older children", also known as The Sword and the Dream (series)[1] after the title of its two-volume reissue.
Commenting on her work, Janice Elliott wrote, "I have always tried to avoid writing in a way that might invite categorisation in either subject matter or treatment.