The daughter of an insurance manager in Leeds, she was educated at Queen Anne's School, Caversham, where she was reputed to have told her headteacher that she knew precisely what she wanted to become: secretary to T. S.

[2] She had been an admirer of Eliot since, at the age of 14, hearing John Gielgud read Journey of the Magi,[3] as she confided to the novelist Charles Morgan, for whom she worked as a secretary.

In a 1994 interview with The Independent, she recalled a very ordinary life of evenings spent at home playing Scrabble and eating cheese, stating "He obviously needed a happy marriage.

She assisted Christopher Ricks with his edition of The Inventions of the March Hare (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse.

[5] One of Valerie Eliot's most lucrative decisions as executor was granting permission for a stage musical to be based on her husband's work Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.