Thorpe Talbot was the daughter of James Talbot, a hairdresser, and Ellen Talbot (nee Dean). In the 1852 census Ellen Talbot was listed as living in Horton, Bradford, Yorks, her occupation 'milliner and bonnet maker'. James Talbot was listed as living at a different address. In 1854 Ellen Talbot and her daughter Frances Talbot travelled to Melbourne on the Albatross. The novel, Philiberta, that Frances Talbot wrote nearly thirty years later as Thorpe Talbot, includes details that suggest its author was educated in Australia. Talbot's biographer, Geoff Adams, has said that 'the girl's childhood in Australia is something of a mystery but her writing showed that she received a very good and wide education.'
Adams has discovered that Talbot travelled alone to New Zealand in 1867 on the Otago that docked at Hokitika on the west coast of the South Island. The Australian connection remains firm as she wrote articles for Australian newspapers. Her poems in the Australasian were reprinted in New Zealand newspapers. In 1881, the Melbourne Leader announced that Talbot had won its one hundred pound novel writing competition with Philiberta, which it then published in twenty-seven instalments before its publication as a book. In 1882 Wilson and Horton, Auckland, published The New Guide to the Lakes and Hot Springs and A Month in Hot Water, Talbot's two-part work: the first a guide to the Rotorua district; and the second part more specifically her personal experiences and comment. Its title page identifies her as the author of Philiberta and Blue Cap, and also Guinevere in the South. The latter is often assumed to have been a novel, an assumption to be challenged by Talbot's biographer, who says that Guinevere was probably first published in an Australian paper before 1882. Lawrence Jones, assessing Philiberta as an Australian/New Zealand novel, suggests that its author may have been a professional journalist: in 1887 she published, in the Otago Witness, a series of travel accounts about a visit to California. Morris Miller describes Talbot as a 'contributor of short stories and poems to "annuals" and miscellanies'.
In 1906, Talbot married Charles Dudley Robert Ward, a district judge and occasionally acting judge in the Supreme Court. She continued to live in their Dunedin home after Ward's death in 1914. Talbot died in hospital in Dunedin after living for some years in poor circumstances.
