Lindsay Russell was educated at Charlton State School, Victoria, finishing at the age of fourteen. In her teens she published some verse and short stories in Australian journals (notably the Sydney Bulletin and the Australian Journal), and later became a journalist in Melbourne. Russell became a member of the Australian Modernist Society of Enlightened Roman Catholics, and while in London she joined the International Modernist Association and the Jeanne d' Arc League. In 1915 she edited America to Japan: A Symposium of Papers by Representative Citizens of the United States on the Relations Between Japan and America and on the Common Interests of the Two Countries and in 1918 Rising Japan: Is She a Menace or a Comrade to be Welcomed in the Fraternity of Nations?
Russell spent some years in Ireland during World War I, where she wrote nine of her novels. Morris Miller, in Australian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1935 (1940), states that her husband was Dr. Ian Scott of Mortlake, Victoria. However, the online Australian Dictionary of Biography says Russell married John McNaught Scott, a Harley Street specialist, in 1914 in Scotland. After World War I Russell and her husband settled in Mortlake. She was known locally as eccentric and, after her husband's death in 1942, she became a hermit. Russell died in the Royal Park psychiatric hospital in Melbourne.
