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Frances Margaret Taylor was born on 20 January 1832 at Stoke Rochford in Lincolnshire, England, the youngest of ten children of the Reverend Henry Taylor, Anglican rector of the parish, and his wife Louisa. She was raised in a High Church Anglican household that stressed personal devotion and practical charity. After her father's death the family left the rectory and settled in London, where Frances and her sisters visited the poor and took part in the philanthropic work expected of women of their background. The combination of a serious religious upbringing and early contact with urban poverty formed the two poles of her later vocation.

In 1854 she volunteered as a nurse for the British forces in the Crimean War and travelled to the East, serving in military hospitals in the region of Constantinople. There she encountered Irish Sisters of Mercy whose example, together with her own reading and the ministry of Catholic chaplains, drew her toward the Roman Catholic Church. She was received into the Church in 1855. On her return to England she published Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses (1856), a widely read first-hand account of wartime nursing. She then established herself as a Catholic writer and journalist, producing novels, historical and biographical studies, and works of popular devotion, and contributing to Catholic periodicals including The Lamp. Her books were intended both to instruct English readers in the Catholic faith and to support charitable work.

In the late 1860s, with encouragement from Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and in close cooperation with the convert philanthropist Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Taylor gathered a group of women to serve the destitute of London. In 1869 this community became the religious congregation of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, of which she was foundress and first Superior General under her religious name, Mother Magdalen. The sisters devoted themselves to nursing, the care of children and of vulnerable women, teaching, and visiting the poor. Under her leadership the congregation opened houses in England and Ireland and began foundations on the Continent. Taylor continued to write throughout her years in office, using her publications to explain Catholic teaching and to raise support for the sisters' works.

Mother Magdalen Taylor died in London on 9 June 1900. The congregation she founded survived her and expanded in the twentieth century, remaining active especially in Britain and Ireland. She is remembered as a Crimean War nurse, a Victorian convert of literary gifts, and a religious foundress whose institute was dedicated to the poorest. She has not been beatified or canonized, and no universal feast day or official patronage is attached to her name.

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