Born Elizabeth Rhoda Holden on 5 June 1943 in Leatherhead, Surrey,[2] to bricklayer Fred Holden and cook Rhoda Edith (née Cowles),[3] she and her younger sister Catherine[4] attended Poplar Road Primary School, Leatherhead, between 1948 and 1954.[2] The family then moved to the Forest of Dean, where her mother had been born and grew up,[4] and there Lawrence attended Lydney Grammar School between 1954 and 1961.[3] Her first published poem, “The Moon”, appeared in the Lydney Grammar School magazine in 1958.[4]
Between 1961 and 1963 she worked as a junior assistant at the Gloucestershire County Library,[2] then left to marry Keith Wintle.[4] She had three children with her first husband,[3] and at this point began to write, in part as an escape from being "totally isolated socially and environmentally in a remote farmhouse, with a husband who had no time for me", as she later put it.[2] She resumed local library assistant work in 1969,[2] and wrote four ("very bad" by her own estimation[2]) unpublished novels before Andra, her first published novel. She then left her husband and set out on a career as a professional writer.[2] Andra was serialised in 1976 by ABC for Australian TV.[4]
She married Graham Mace in 1987.[2] In 1998 they moved to County Mayo in Ireland, where Lawrence continued to be active in writers' circles and festivals.[4] She died in 2013.[4]