Her father was a runholder and Justice of the Peace in Southland, but Gordon Rich was born in England, where the family may have travelled for the education of Josephine's older brothers.

[1] She presented eleven stuffed fish to the Canterbury Museum in 1893, and supplied mollusc specimens to zoologist Henry Suter, who almost named a new species after her.

[4] The paper described in detail the entire musculature of the animal; it was read before the Otago Institute in 1892 and published in the Maclay Memorial Volume of the New South Wales Linnean Society in 1893.

[1] On 28 August 1894, Josephine married the Australian William Aitcheson Haswell (1854–1925), a friend of Thomas Jeffrey Parker, in Christchurch, New Zealand, and subsequently moved to Australia.

[6][7][8] Haswell was a professor of biology at the University of Sydney, and although Rich does not appear to have published after her marriage, she assisted her husband in his work.