[2] She grew up in Leeds, where she attended Lawnswood High School, winning an open scholarship to read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1974.

[5] She is Honorary Professor at the University of Aberystwyth, an Advisory Editor of the journal Romanticism,[6] a Fellow of the English Association,[7] and a Patron of the Wordsworth Trust.

[9] She was co-founder, with Stuart Estell, of the Hall Writers' Forum, an online resource launched in 2013 for the exchange of writing and discussion of literature and the arts.

[11] Lucy Newlyn's longstanding research interests are eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, especially poetry and non-fictional prose in the Romantic period; influences on Romanticism; the reception of Romanticism; creativity and multiple authorship; allusion and intertextuality; reader-response and reception theory.

[17] She is general co-editor of Edward Thomas, Selected Prose Writings, a six-volume edition for Oxford University Press.

Her first collection, Ginnel (Oxford Poets/Carcanet, 2005) concerns her ‘intense local attachment’ to the streets and alleys of Headingley in Leeds, where she grew up.

[21][22] A recording of Ginnel, read by Sherry Baines, has been published as a ‘Daisy Book’ CD by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).

Newlyn's second collection, Earth's Almanac (Enitharmon Press, 2015) was written in the fifteen years after the death of her sister.