The Reverend Betty Atwater (née Carol Betty Osborne) was born in 1915 near Great Falls, Montana, the fifth of seven children. Her father was a travelling Baptist minister. Atwater married Charles Phillips at age 15; by the time she met Lowry in 1939, she was divorced and living in Long Beach with her two young daughters.

Atwater was Malcolm Lowry’s typist during the spring and early summer of 1939 when the author was in Los Angeles. Without steady employment, Atwater did freelance typing work; her brother, Jimmy Osborne, was a friend of Lowry’s and recommended his sister when Lowry mentioned he needed a typist. Atwater assisted Lowry first with The Last Address and then for several weeks with a very early draft (possibly the first) of Under the Volcano. The two never met again after Lowry abruptly left Los Angeles for Vancouver, him having met his future second wife Margerie that July, but they maintained a limited correspondence until September 1939, when Atwater mailed Lowry the draft Volcano manuscript and what work she had managed to complete of it to that point.

After her brief relationship with Lowry (they were lovers, according to Atwater, during work on the Volcano typescript), Atwater became a Baptist minister, piano teacher, and student and teacher of astrology. She also continued to write poetry, plays, and novels. She married Dwight Edward Atwater in 1942.