Liebeck was born in Bromley on 11 July 1930,[1] grew up in Surrey, and read mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford beginning in 1949.
After additional study at the University of Cambridge, she became a mathematics teacher.
Her husband Hans Liebeck was also an Oxford mathematics student; they met through a shared love of playing chamber music, married in 1953, and moved together to Cape Town University in South Africa in 1955, where Liebeck taught mathematics part-time while raising two children and studying music.
As their (now three) children grew old enough, she returned to teaching, first at the Madeley College of Education in Newcastle-under-Lyme (eventually part of Staffordshire University) and then at Keele University, where her husband had been posted since their return to England.
[2] Her son, Martin W. Liebeck,[3] became a mathematics professor at Imperial College London.