Birgit Signe Julia Fredrique Th(omaeus) Sparre grew up in a manor as the adoptive daughter of the aristocratic Sparre family. Following university studies, including a period at the Paris Sorbonne University, and extensive cultural and tourist travels in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, she made her debut in 1925 with a travel account from Tenerife, Ön av eld och lava. A year later, she published her Künstlerroman Ett leende. Her work Gärdarna runt sjön, 1928, was the first in a series of romantic descriptions of manors with which her name is particularly associated.
In her long series of autobiographies, beginning with Därhemma på gårdarna, 1960, she returns once again to the local tales and legends she heard as a child and to her childhood milieu, which were her main source in her highly popular writing.