Franklin was educated at Norland Place, a private day school in West London, Lindores School for Young Ladies, a boarding school in Sussex, and St Paul's Girls' School in London. She then studied natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge, from which she graduated in 1941. Earning a research fellowship, she joined the University of Cambridge physical chemistry laboratory under Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, who disappointed her for his lack of enthusiasm. The British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) offered her a research position in 1942 and started her work on coals. This helped her earn a Ph.D. in 1945. She went to Paris in 1947 as a "chercheur" (postdoctoral researcher) under Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, where she became an accomplished X-ray crystallographer. She became a research associate at King's College London in 1951 and worked on X-ray diffraction studies, which would eventually facilitate the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. In 1953, after two years, owing to disagreement with her director, John Randall, and her colleague Maurice Wilkins, she was compelled to move to Birkbeck College. At Birkbeck, John Desmond Bernal, chair of the physics department, offered her a separate research team. She died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer.