Ann Sophia Stephens was born on March 30, 1810 in Derby, Connecticut, she was the daughter of Ann and John Winterbotham. He was the manager of a woolen mill owned by Col. David Humphreys. Her grandfather was William Winterbotham. Her mother died early and she was brought up by her mother's sister, who eventually became her stepmother. She was educated at a dame school in South Britain, Connecticut and started writing at an early age. She married Edward Stephens, a printer from Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1831 and they relocated to Portland, Maine.

While in Portland, she and her husband co-founded, published and edited the Portland Magazine, a monthly literary periodical where some of her early work first appeared. The magazine was sold in 1937. They moved to New York where Ann took the job of editor to The Ladies Companion and where she could further her literary work. This was also the time she adopted the humorous pseudonym Jonathan Slick. Over the next few years she wrote over twenty-five serial novels plus short stories and poems for several well known periodicals which included Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's Magazine. She started her own magazine Mrs Stephens' Illustrated New Monthly in 1856, it was published by her husband. The magazine merged with Peterson's Magazine a few years later. Her first novel Fashion and famine was published in 1854.

The term "dime novel" originated with Stephens's Maleaska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, printed in the first book in Beadle & Adams Beadle’s Dime Novels series, dated June 9, 1860. The novel was a reprint of Stephens's earlier serial that appeared in the Ladies' Companion magazine in February, March, and April 1839. Later, the Grolier Club listed Maleaska as the most influential book of 1860. Some of her other work includes High Life in New York (1843), Alice Copley: A Tale of Queen Mary's Time (1844), The Diamond Necklace and Other Tale (1846), The Old Homestead (1855), The Rejected Wife (1863) and A Noble Woman (1871).