Jennifer Dawson was born and brought up in Kennington and Camberwell, South London with her three sisters and one brother. She was educated at Mary Datchelor School in Camberwell.

Jennifer read History at St Anne's College, Oxford. During her time at Oxford University she suffered a breakdown and spent several months in the Warneford Hospital, Oxford.

After graduating in 1954, Jennifer worked variously as a teacher in a convent in Laval, France, as a subeditor and indexer for the Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press on two encyclopaedias and the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, as a welfare worker in London's East End and as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital in Worcester. In 1959 she was awarded the Dawes Hicks Sch