Anna Doyle was the daughter of the Rev. Nicholas Milley Doyle, a Church of Ireland clergyman, Rector of Newcastle, County Tipperary. She had no formal education, but learned French, geography, reading and writing at home. In 1795, at about the age of fifteen, she married Francis Massey Wheeler, of Lizard Connell, heir to an estate at Ballywire, who proposed to her at a ball. Born in 1776, and a grandson of Hugh Massy, 1st Baron Massy (1700–1788) he was himself only nineteen, and they set up home in County Limerick. According to the autobiography of her daughter Rosina, Wheeler had five daughters, although a more general source says two. Her daughter Rosina Doyle Wheeler, who later wrote that she had been born in 1802, became the novelist Rosina Bulwer Lytton.