Edith was born around 961 to King Edgar the Peaceful and Wulfthryth — a young noblewoman whom the king had taken from the Wilton women's-abbey nunnery (where she was a novice) and compelled into a morganatic marriage. After Edith's birth, the queen-mother Wulfthryth returned to Wilton with the infant Edith and the two lived as royal-monastic mother-and-daughter at the abbey for the rest of their lives.
Edith was educated at Wilton from infancy under her mother (who became abbess of Wilton, and who is also venerated as a saint). She refused multiple royal proposals (marriages to continental nobles, the throne of Wilton Abbey itself, the kingship of Wessex in succession to her martyred half-brother King Edward in 978) — choosing to remain a simple nun at Wilton in the habit of a royal embroideress.
She was renowned for her embroidery — producing the ceremonial vestments and altar-cloths for the Wessex Catholic episcopate — and for her gentle care of the poor at the abbey-gate of Wilton.
She died on September 16, 984, at the age of 23. Her reputation for sanctity was so immediate that Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury (her maternal uncle by ecclesiastical kinship) translated her relics in 997 to a new shrine at Wilton — the principal pilgrim destination of Wiltshire throughout the medieval centuries.