She was born in Sant Gervasi de Cassoles. She was only child, her father was accountant, a poetry lover and he always recited poems when she was a child, but he died during the Civil War in a bombing. Her mother lived until 1964, a woman with high interest in music. Both of them were theatre and literature lovers.

She went to school from seven to ten years old in two different centres, until her grandpa died, who really left a mark on her and who had educated her with the catalanist feeling and love to the catalan language, which is portrayed later in Rodoreda’s works. Since then she dedicates her time to learning how to sew and cook, without giving up the lecture. She got married when she was twenty with his uncle Joan Gurguí, fourteen years older than her.

They had a child and moved to a house in Barcelona. At that moment she started doing literary proves so she could get free form the economic and social dependence that the marriage supposed, and finally it became her job. Everyday she wrote, and she ended by making a theatre comedy and a novell. 

In 1931 she started teaching in Liceu Dalmau where she improved her knowledges in language, taught by Delfín Dalmau, with who she published a work together. In 1931 she published her first work Sóc una dona honrada? and some tales, which finally received the Joan Creixells Award. 

In 1933 she started her periodistic career and she takes part in the Barcelona Press Association. She continued publishing novels and receiving awards, so she entered in the Novelists Club. Also, she went on publishing children's tales for catalan newspapers. 

When the Civil War started she collaborated as a catalan corrector in the Advertising Commission from the Generalitat. While she knew more new writers, she went on winning prizes and finally she divorced her husband. Her supposed secret lover was arrested in the Barcelona Rambla, tortured and murdered by the soviet police. A year later, in Catalonia PEN Club representation, she travels to Praga with other famous writers.

In 1939 she took up exile in France, and thinking it would be for a short time period, she left her son with her mother, because she went to France because her mother was who recommend it to her, as Mercè was collaborating in publications in catalana and leftist newspapers. She took a bus from Barcelona to Girona and walked to the border. 

She installed in the Roissy-en-Brie Castle, that was offered for refugiating writers. There she knew and fell in love with Joan Prat Esteve, who was married and already has one daugther, but nonetheless they started a relationship and went living together in Limoges, escaping from the nazis that were invading France. In 1941 he was arrested and exploited in a quarry, and later transferred to Burdeos. She was also transferred and she worked as a tailor, giving up writing. Later they moved to Paris for eight years, and in 1947 she was able to stop doing sewing permanently and writing for Revista de Catalunya (Catalonia’s Magazine). During that period she couldn’t write incredible works and she spent more time doing poetry, as in 1945 she started to have health problems and a somatic paralysis in the right arm. so in 1952 she started doing a recovery treatment. 

In the 1947 “Jocs Florals” of the Catalan Language celebrated in London she won her first “Natural Flower” with six sonnets, and she was named “Mestre en Gai Saber” in Montevideo in 1952, the year that she visited Barcelona for the first time after her exile. In 1951 she interested in painting and she did her own paints, but in 1952 she moved with her partner to Geneva, as he worked as a translator for the UNESCO, a city that she didn’t really like, but where she wrote, apart from another amount of publications, her most famous novel La plaça del diamant (“The Diamond Square”). 

In 1971 her partner died in Vienna. This and the fact that Mercè discovered that he had a lover, made her pass through a hard time. In 1972 she returned to Catalonia and she settled down in Romanyà de la Selva with two friends of her, where she lived until she built her own house in the same town, where she wrote another of her most famous novels, Mirall Trencat (“Broken Mirror”). During that time, apart from receiving many recognitions, some of her best works where done in television, La plaça del diamant as an example. 

Finally Rodoreda died in Girona when she was 75 because of a liver cancer. Her mental legacy was donated to the Catalan Studies School that some years later created the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation.