Her father was an Austrian journalist who worked in Germany, subsequently a newspaper editor in Nuremberg and, after the First World War when he acquired German nationality, a socialist member of the Weimar Reichstag.

She was educated in Bavaria, St Petersburg and, after her parents divorced and her Russian-born mother remarried an Englishman, at Harrogate Ladies' College.

[1] In 1920 she married Bertram Martin Wilson (1896–1935), a mathematician at the University of Liverpool, and in 1928 after their divorce, wed his superior, John Charles Burkill, a mathematics professor there.

She is credited with arranging for hundreds to be refugees in Britain[1] This was as part of the Kindertransport[3] however many of those help were older and their studies had been interrupted by changes in Nazi Germany.

Her husband put her papers in order regarding her work with refugees and they are held in Cambridge University Library.