Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born in 1877 near Liverpool. She attended St Hilda's College, Oxford, and earned an Honours degree in Modern History in 1898, but the degree was not officially awarded until 1920, when the university finally allowed a generation of women scholars to receive their degrees.
During the First World War, Broster volunteered as a nurse, and in 1915 she went to France with the British Red Cross. In peacetime she worked as the secretary for the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and during this time she began writing historical fiction. Her name was made by her bestselling Jacobite trilogy, The Flight of the Heron (1925), The Gleam in the North (1927), and The Dark Mile (1929). Most of her supernatural fiction appears in two collections: A Fire of Driftwood (1932) and Couching at the Door (1942). Broster never married but had a close friendship with Gertrude Schlich which lasted from the time of the First World War to Broster's death in 1950.