[3][4] Her parents were John Ramsay Darling, a science teacher at Winchester College and Patricia Rosemary, who was a nurse and a Quaker.

She later wrote that as a teenager, she had put up anti-apartheid and pro-choice posters in her bedroom windows earning her a complaint from the Jane Austen Society.

Darling moved to Newcastle in 1980 and began her writing career as a poet, publishing a collection entitled Small Beauties in 1988 and working with a performance group called "The Poetry Virgins".

[citation needed] In 2003, Darling's first full-length collection of poems, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, was published by Arc and was awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

[7] On 13 October 1984 Darling married Ivan Paul Sears, a trade union organiser who later changed his name to Ieuan Einion.