Grace Mabel Bacon was born on April 27, 1878 in Northampton, Massachusetts to Charles E. Bacon, a grocer, and Georgiana T. Leach Bacon. After attending high school in Springfield, Massachusetts, she went to Mount Holyoke College, where she majored in German with minors in Latin and history. She graduated in 1901, then received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She studied at the University of Berlin, at Munich and at Freiburg, and did summer work at Harvard, Columbia and the Sorbonne. She taught briefly at Franklin High School in New Hampshire and Ypsilanti High School in Michigan. In 1906 she returned to Mount Holyoke to teach German and became associate professor in 1914. From September 1918 to June 1919 Bacon worked in Europe during World War I. She originally worked for the Red Cross in France in 1918 and from 1918-1919 she organized and taught German classes for the Army Education Corps of the American Expeditionary Force (A.E.F.), an organization created by the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) for American soldiers occupying different parts of Europe after World War I. From 1924-1925 Bacon was head of the French department at Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts. For the next three years she was professor and head of the German Department at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. In 1928 Bacon rejoined the Mount Holyoke faculty, becoming a professor in 1931. She travelled throughout Germany and conducted student tours in Europe. In 1943 she retired, residing in South Hadley, Massachusetts until her death on September 21, 1967, at the age of eighty-nine.