Her family was ruined by the French Revolution and moved to the French colony of Guadeloupe. She returned to Paris upon her mother's death, supporting herself by acting at the Opéra-Comique and the Odéon. She married a second-rate actor, Prosper Lanchantin, called Valmore.

When illness threatened her stage voice, Desbordes-Valmore turned to writing. Her poetry—Pauvres Fleurs (1839; “Poor Flowers”), Les Pleurs (1833; “The Tears”), and Bouquets et prières (1843; “Bouquets and Prayers”)—is poignant and elegiac and concerns religion, sadness, death, and the author's love for her daughters and her native Douai. Her prose work L'Atelier d'un peintre (1833; “A Painter's Studio”) is autobiographical. The poet Charles Baudelaire (Baudelaire, Charles) esteemed her writing, and Paul Verlaine (Verlaine, Paul) admitted his debt to her, giving her a place in his revised edition of Les Poètes maudits (1888; “The Damned 【or Maligned】 Poets”).