Edna Mayne Hull was born in Brandon, Manitoba, the daughter English parents. After school she was a private secretary, then she moved to Winnipeg, where she met A. E. van Vogt at a writers' group. She married him in 1939, shortly before his first story "Black Destroyer" was published. For most of van Vogt's writing career, she was his typist, and after typing out many of his stories in the early 1940s, she began to publish her own fiction. Several stories and one novel were published under her name, although there is evidence to suggest that van Vogt either co-authored or solely wrote all of these works, using his wife's name as a pseudonym and publicly crediting her for the work.