Ellen Mary Rope was born in 1855, the seventh of nine children born to George and Ann Rope of Grove Farm, Blaxhall, Suffolk. While her eldest brother, George Thomas Rope, was a painter and naturalist, "Nell" (as the family knew her) specialised in sculpture, particularly bas reliefs in a variety of materials. She worked in London for much of her artistic career, often sharing a studio with her niece Dorothy Anne Aldrich Rope, also a sculptor, and near another niece, Margaret Edith Rope. At some time in the nineteen-twenties, she retired to the family farm in Suffolk, where she died in 1934