She was born in Upper Woodstock, New Brunswick, one of eight children of Francis Peabody Sharp and his wife Maria Shaw.

[2] Minnie Bell Sharp later described her childhood and youth as "a glorious life" and her family's home as "a veritable fairyland".

She recalled having "an unlimited capacity for hard work" and being "up at daylight packing and shipping apples and plums" during the harvest season.

[3] She was educated mainly by her mother, with one year spent at Compton Ladies' College, an Anglican boarding school in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, when she was 14.

[4] She taught music in Woodstock, New Brunswick and organized local concerts in which her students performed, on one occasion joined by friends of Sharp's from Fredericton and New York.

[4] The Sharp family businesses in New Brunswick were losing money due to a combination of factors including the effect of the protectionist McKinley Tariff introduced in the United States in 1890, the death in 1892 from tuberculosis of Francis Peabody Sharp's son Franklin, who had taken over the businesses from his father, and the devastation of the plum orchard by an unusually cold winter in the following year.

[2] In order to assist her parents and unmarried sister, Minnie Bell Sharp sent money home, and went into debt to do so.

[4] In 1897, while she was home for the summer, the Woodstock school district trustees presented her with a bill for back taxes owed by the Sharp orchards.

[7]: 36  She was released after she realized that she was not subject to arrest because she was a non-resident, a fact that she learned by reading the New Brunswick statutes while in jail.

[7]: 40 In 1919, Minnie Bell Sharp Adney announced her candidacy as an Independent for the federal constituency of Victoria—Carleton in a by-election to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of Frank Broadstreet Carvell.

She declared that she would support the government in office and would "work first for justice and the people; for an adequate recompense for our wonderful soldier boys", "for the children of our land", "for our common cause, without destruction of classes or creeds or the drawing of stringent political lines, for the good of all, the public weal and humanity".

Among the items in her platform were "more pay for the soldiers", "mothers' bonus such as obtains in Ontario", and "return to old high license of a liquor law or such a system as Quebec or British Columbia have, whereby the national debt could be liquidated in two years".

At her invitation Mrs. Adney's son Tappan and daughter Mary Ruth visited the Sharp family in New Brunswick in the summer of 1887.