Jean Taylor was born in Melbourne in 1944, and raised in country Victoria. Pregnant at 17, married at 18 and with two children by the time she was 19, she came out as a lesbian in 1979.

Jean has worked in a variety of jobs including nursing, waitressing, women's refuge work and tram driving. She has been a member of various feminist activist collectives in the Women's Liberation Movement since the early 1970s, including the Victorian Women's Liberation and the Lesbian Feminist Archives. She has also performed with lesbian theatre groups and the Women's Circus (where she learned how to walk on stilts at age 47) and initiated and directed the Performing Older Women's Circus for women over 40.

Jean has written several novels, plays, short stories and some poetry and began self-publishing her books in 1976, including Sappho's Wild Lesbians and Loose Women, under the pseudonym of Emily George and the logo of Dykebooks.

She is the author of The C-Word: A Story about Cancer (2000) and co-editor of Women's Circus: Leaping Off the Edge (1997).