Norton's family moved from Dunedin, New Zealand, to Sydney in June 1925.

Aged 14, Norton was expelled from Chatswood Girls’ Grammar for drawings of vampires, ghouls and werewolves that were considered likely to corrupt the other students. She enrolled at East Sydney Technical College, but left after two years without graduating. She worked as a kitchen maid, night-club waitress, PMG messenger and trainee journalist for Smith’s Weekly.

Norton's first published illustrations were in the October 1941 issue of Pertinent.

In 1949, Norton's Melbourne exhibition of pagan, sexually explicit drawings led to her being charged with obscenity, but the charges were dismissed after she provided detailed explanations of her occult symbolism to the court.

Norton began to compile a series of mystical drawings with her lover Gavin Greenlees providing accompanying poems, published by Walter Glover in The Art of Rosaleen Norton (1952). Glover was charged with publishing an obscene publication and required to censor the most explicit images for distribution in Australia. Export copies were burnt by US Customs and Glover went bankrupt.

Norton was a well known occult artist and bohemian in the fifties and sixties, and became known as 'The Witch of Kings Cross’.

Glover reissued The Art of Rosaleen Norton in 1982 and later published The Supplement to The Art of Rosaleen Norton in 1984.