John Edward Courtenay Bodley was born on June 6, 1853, in Hanley, Staffordshire, England, a descendant of Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

He was an English civil servant, barrister, and author. He was educated at Mill Hill School and studied at Balliol College, Oxford (1873-1876). His friends at Oxford included Oscar Wilde and Cecil Rhodes. Called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1874, he practised as a barrister on the Oxford circuit, and then in 1880, he became political secretary to Sir Charles Dilke, an English Liberal and Radical politician. His father was so disappointed at his abandoning law that he disinherited him. In 1884, Dilke appointed Bodley as secretary of the royal commission on the housing of the working classes. Bodley wrote three reports on housing for England, Scotland, and Ireland, but his political hopes were dashed when Dilke was ruined by a divorce scandal in 1885. Bodley travelled to South Africa in 1887–1888 and the United States and Canada in 1888–1889, meeting senior officials, politicians, and churchmen, and in 1890, he settled in France. There he began his literary career with the publication of “France" (1898), on French political institutions, which displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of French local customs and traditions. It was followed by “L'anglomanie et les traditions françaises” (1899).

In 1891, he married Evelyn Frances Bell (1872–1955), divorced in 1907 and in 1920, he remarried Phyllis Helen Lomax (1882–1968). He died on May 28, 1925, in Cuckfield, Sussex, England.