Alice Sophia Amelia Stopford was born in Archdeaconry House, Kells, Co Meath, on 31st May 1847. Her father Edward Adderley Stopford was Rector of Kells and Archdeacon of Meath. His father was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Meath. Alice was educated at home and after the death of her father the family moved to London. From 1874 to 1877 she lived in London where she met and married the historian John Richard Green. He died in 1883. She had become collaborator in his work as an historian. Her first book Town Life in the Fifteenth Century was published in 1894. John Morley published her first historical work Henry II in 1888.

In the 1890s she became interested in Irish history and the nationalist movement. She was vocal in her opposition to English colonial policy in South Africa during the Boer War and supported Sir Roger Casement's Congo Reform movement. Her 1908 book The Making of Ireland and its Undoing argued for the sophistication and richness of the native Irish civilisation. Stopford Green was active in efforts to make the prospect of Home Rule more palatable to Ulster Unionists. She was closely involved in the Howth gun-running.

She moved to Dublin in 1918 where her house at 90 St Stephen's Green became an intellectual centre. She supported the pro-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War and was among the first nominees to the newly formed Seanad Éireann in 1922, where she served as an independent member until her death in Dublin on 28th May, 1929 aged 81. 
• Henry the Second (1903) first published 1888 
• Town Life in the Fifteenth Century Vol. I (1894) 
• Town Life in the Fifteenth Century Vol. II (1894) 
• The making of Ireland and its undoing, 1200-1600 (1909) first pub 1908 
• Irish nationality (c1911)
• The old Irish world (1912) 
• Loyalty and disloyalty: what it means in Ireland (1918?) 
• A History of the Irish State to 1014 published in 1925 was her last major work
• R. B. McDowell, Alice Stopford-Green: A Passionate Historian (1967) 
• Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, The Stopford Connection (1985)