Elisabeth said that she loved the countryside and had a happy secure childhood. She learned to ride a horse by the age of four, to handle a rifle by five, and accompanied her father on local shoots, where she had ample opportunity to observe the shapes of dead animals and broken birds. She was only nine ­ and her brother, Tim, four ­ when the Second World War started and her father left home (he was at Dunkirk and for some time was presumed dead). She would have become accustomed to seeing men in uniform, German fighters firing, English bombers circling to land at Stradishall and Wratting Common airfields and the planes of both forces being shot down, burning, disintegrating, perhaps with men falling and spinning to earth. The artist said that some of her continuing nightmares were about war, blood, and herself falling, and it seems reasonable to link all these experiences to her early series of drawings and sculptures of predatory birds, men at one with horses, and falling, spinning figures.

An all-rounder at Catholic and Church of England schools in Exmouth, Devon, Elisabeth left at sixteen to attend Guildford Art School and Chelsea School of Art. She taught at Chelsea for eight years, as well as at St Martin's School of Art, and became a Visiting Instructor at the Royal College of Art.

Her first exhibition was at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, in 1952, and the Tate bought one of her bird series that year, when Elisabeth was only twenty-two. Other purchases and commissions followed, as did showings at national and international exhibitions (Frink was associated with Waddington Galleries from 1958 until 1985); though some critics in the sixties persisted in accusations that she was copying Rodin, or else misunderstood or ignored her work. Preferring to work alone and uninþuenced, approaching her art instinctively not intellectually, Frink said, 'Make up your mind and stick to what you want to work . . . to hell with everybody.' Art was her vocation; she followed it with complete commitment and no thought of material success.