Elizabeth Sharpless Bradley was born in Ridley Township, Pennsylvania on June 25, 1734 to a Quaker family. In 1755 she married Richard Bradley, an English Quaker at the Chester County Meeting House in Pennsylvania. In 1758 she and her husband and their daughter Lucy moved to North Carolina, eventually settling in Wilmington, North Carolina. She may have left the faith, as her husband served as a paymaster during the Revolutionary War. She died in New Hanover County in about 1802.