Gee was one of six women among the 20 writers on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983, which she recalls as "a very good time for fiction.
She was educated at Horsham High School for Girls,[5] won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford and did an MA in English literature and an MLitt on Surrealism in England.
After university, she worked in publishing for two years and then became a research assistant at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed a Ph.D. in The Self-Conscious Novel from Sterne to Vonnegut.
[3] Gee lived in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin, and their daughter Rosa Rankin-Gee, who is also a novelist.
[9] The first book-length study of her work, Mine Özyurt Kılıç's Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel, was published in 2013.
She turns a satirical eye on contemporary society but is affectionate towards her characters and has an unironic sense of the beauty of the natural world.