Edith was born near Toorak in the then south-eastern outskirts of Melbourne, in February 1862, during the years her father was serving as ADC and military secretary to the Governor of Victoria Colony, Sir Henry Barkly, K.B.C..

The Bancroft family returned to England in January 1864 and settled in London. Thanks no doubt to Edith's mother's marriage settlement, when her father went back to regimental duties with the 16th Regiment the following January, she, Blanche and her mother were able to remain at their comfortable residence in the Notting Hill area of London while he moved from one army posting to another.³

After her father returned to England from Barbados with the 2nd Battalion in January 1869 (he was by then its commanding officer), he was based with it at a number of "home stations" - Dublin, Canterbury⁴, Colchester⁵, Aldershot⁶ and Chatham - and there is ample evidence that Edith and her family joined him at several of those locations. So for a while, until the 2nd Battalion was sent to India in 1876, Edith and her siblings probably led a fairly peripatetic existence.
     
The Bancroft family did not go to India, possibly because it was anticipated that Edith's father, due to his army seniority, would soon be given a more senior role in England and, perhaps, also because it was thought that Edith's and her sisters' educational needs would be better served by the family remaining in England. It is known that Blanche and Alice attended a small girls' boarding school situated in Islington, London, during the early part of the 1880s and it is quite likely that Edith did so too but nothing has been found to confirm that.

At the time of the 1881 Census, Edith then aged 19, was living with her parents at Preston where her father was in command of the Brigade Depot of the 47th Regimental District and from that time on, she seems to have always lived at the parental home.⁷ Interestingly enough, the 1891 Census shows her and her father at Knellwood but not her mother, Blanche or Alice who were presumably abroad as they are not to be found anywhere in that Census. After her mother's death in 1895, it seems likely that she became chatelaine of Knellwood, though she may have had some competition in that role from her two sisters until they married.

Edith's mother appointed her an executor of her Will along with a male family friend but, rather surprisingly, it was her sister Alice, no doubt with the help of her husband Sidney, who dealt with their father's affairs on his death.

After Knellwood was sold in 1903, Edith settled in central London where she lived in some style in a number of residences: Belgrave Mansions in Grosvenor Gardens until c. 1910, then in Cadogan Gardens and from 1914 in Cadogan Place where she stayed until c. 1932 when she took a house in Ilchester Place.⁸ Additionally, during the early 1920s, she had a house in Brighton⁹ and, according to Helena O'Flanagan, a property in Mentone on the Riviera;¹⁰ the latter residence might explain why she was travelling on the P & O ship Mantau from Marseilles to Tilbury in April 1923. Also during the 1920s, she owned or rented a property in Phillimore Mews in London which probably accommodated her car and a chauffeur to drive it.
   
Sadly, little is known about how Edith occupied herself during those years though anecdotal reports suggest she lived very comfortably in a manner befitting an active, rich and independent woman. We do know, however, that she took a great interest in the history of the Bancroft family and, in particular, the controversial career of her great-grandfather, Dr Edward Bancroft.

Over the years Edith compiled a well-researched, Bancroft family history. In its introduction she wrote, "This account of the Bancroft Family which only deals with the ancestors and descendants of Lt. Gen. W. C. Bancroft is compiled from family letters and papers, and from extracts made by Lt. Gen. Bancroft and others from Books in the British Museum and from Biographical Dictionaries etc.". ¹¹
  
William Bancroft's own interest in family history went back many years (as far back as 1851 he was asking his aunt Catherine about the family's origins) ¹², and it may have been restimulated by the information that surfaced in 1889 about his grandfather's role as a spy - state papers released at the time revealed that Edward Bancroft had spied for the British government while working at the American Commission in Paris (1777-1783). William was later accused of destroying any incriminating papers that had come down to him from his grandfather. That allegation does not stand up to scrutiny but, sadly, it was promulgated by Lewis Einstein in his book "Divided Loyalties" (1933) on the "say-so" of Julia Vidal (née Espeut).¹³ If any "cover-up" did occur, it was long before the spy story broke in 1889. In a letter dated February 1852, written to William by his aunt Catherine Bancroft from Coblenz, she tells him that she and her sister Maria had destroyed most of their father's less interesting papers sometime in the 1840s due to storage problems.¹⁴ Surely that "bonfire" would not have left any "incriminating" papers for posterity and, in view of Edward Bancroft's cautious habits, it is very unlikely that there would have been any in the first place.
   
Even before Lewis Einstein made public the story about the destruction of Edward's papers, Edith's cousin Edie Ashmore (née Espeut) who lived in Philadelphia, wrote to some unknown person in c. 1924,¹⁵ saying, "… some of the Bancroft papers were burnt by an indignant English descendant but fortunately many were saved." Edie could have only got this story from Edith or her sister Julia Vidal, so somehow it had gained traction even in the family. In the same letter Edie writes "My cranky cousin is liable to burn all the original letters at any time; …". "My cranky cousin" was, of course, Edith* who had earlier supplied Edie with copies of most of Edward's surviving papers - unfortunately, by the time Edie was writing, she had managed to lose many of them in, ironically, a fire and was worried about not being able to replace them.

Edith's Bancroft family history contains biographies of Edward, Edward Nathaniel and her father, William. Edward's draws on many public sources together with his own letters and papers and makes a spirited rebuttal of suggestions that he spied. Edward Nathaniel's is mainly taken from the Dictionary of National Biography, Munk's Roll and his obituary in the Kingston, Royal Gazette. Her father's is surprisingly short and not entirely accurate so, clearly, William had not committed his life's story to paper before he died. Interestingly enough, Edith's biography of her maternal grandfather, Henry Miller, is a good deal longer and more detailed than her father's. Her family history is not dated and was probably written over a number of years but the family trees she drew in it contain information up to 1940, the last entry being for Christopher Cooke (1940-1992) though Edith has him born in 1939.

At the beginning of WW II, the 1939 Register¹⁶ shows her at Alice's and Sidney's house at Horsham. In that document, she is described as "[an] Invalid" with a lady companion as a "Invalid Attendant". Though Edith kept her residence in Ilchester Place until her death, it seems that she, and probably an "Invalid Attendant", left London on account of the Blitz and moved to Guildford for safety, for that was where Edith died in March 1941.
  
12 Foxenden Road where Edith lived at the end of her life, was the home of a Miss Ellen Searle who took in lodgers. Miss Searle had grown up in the village of Little Chesterford just a short distance from Windmill Hill, Saffron Walden, the property where Edith's sister Blanche and her husband Frederick lived between c. 1908 and 1918. The 1911 Census¹⁷ describes Ellen, then aged 18, as a domestic servant and her father as a gardener and it could well be that one or both of them were employed by the Alexanders. If that was the case, Edith might have got to know Ellen and, having kept in touch over the years, was able to seek refuge with her when the bombing became unbearable in London. If that was not the case, then it was a remarkable coincidence that she ended her days in Miss Searle's house in Guildford.

On her death, Edith's estate amounted to c. £38,000 and the principal beneficiary of her Will was her nephew Ronald Cooke.¹⁸