Only daughter of five children of Dorothy (Smales) and William Greenwell, a squire of County Durham. First volume, Poems, 1848; others in 1861 and 1867; religious verse, Carmina Crucis, 1869. Had strong Evangelical sympathies, wrote on religious matters and social problems (child labour, the cotton famine, for example). Lived mostly in the north, with her parents, and later with her brother.
Constance L. Maynard (ed. and intro.), Selected Poems of Dora Greenwell (London, 1906); H. Bett, Dora Greenwell (London: Epworth, 1950).