Juliet Ella Flesch was born on 6 June 1943 in Melbourne, Australia. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Melbourne, she spent over 30 years working as a librarian, first at the National Library of Australia and later at the University of Melbourne Library, before transitioning to a career as a professional historian. She obtained her PhD in 2002 from the Department of History (Women's Studies) at the University of Melbourne. Her dissertation, which examined twentieth-century Australian popular romance novels, was subsequently published as From Australia with love in 2004. Flesch has written and contributed to articles in both librarianship and history journals. In the early 2000s, she became interested in asylum seeker issues after visiting the Maribyrnong Detention Centre in Victoria. Following this, she began regularly visiting and keeping correspondence with detainees of detention centres across Australia, including on Nauru. She was a member of the National Anti-Deportation Alliance (NADA). In 2009, Flesch presented a paper at the Fryer Library as part of Australia's first annual conference on popular romance studies organised by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), and hosted by The University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology.