Geraldine Norman was born on May 13, 1940, and attended St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, from 1958 to 1961, obtaining a BA (Hons) in mathematics. After a postgraduate year studying statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, she returned to England and became the editorial statistician of The Times newspaper. From 1966 to 1967, she spent a year working as an economic writer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome. In 1967, she launched the Times-Sotheby index of art prices, and in 1969, became the sale room correspondent of The Times.

In 1977, she was voted UK News Reporter of the Year for her discovery of art forger Tom Keating. In 1987, she joined The Independent newspaper as an art market correspondent, resigning in 1995 in order to write her book The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (1997).