The Honourable Charlotte Bingham was born in Haywards Heath, Sussex in 1942. Her father, John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, wrote detective stories and was a secret member of MI5. Her mother, Madeleine, was a playwright. Bingham first attended a school in London, but from the age of seven to 16, she went to a school in Haywards Heath. After she left school, Bingham went to stay in Paris with some French aristocrats with the intention of learning French. She had written since she was 10 years old and her first piece of work was a thriller called Death's Ticket. Bingham wrote her humorous autobiography, called Coronet Among the Weeds, when she was 19, and not long before her twentieth birthday a literary agent discovered her celebrating at the Ritz. He was a friend of her parents and he took off the finished manuscript of her autobiography. In 1963, this was published by Heinemanns and was a best seller.

In 1966, Charlotte Bingham's first novel, called Lucinda, was published. This was later adapted into a TV screenplay. In 1972, Coronet Among the Grass, her second autobiography, was published. This talked about the first ten years of her marriage to fellow writer Terence Brady. They couple, who have two children, later adapted Coronet Among the Grass and Coronet Among the Weeds, into the TV sitcom No, Honestly. Bingham and her husband wrote three early episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs together, Board Wages, I Dies from Love and Out of the Everywhere. They later wrote an accompanying book called Rose's Story. In the 1970s Charlotte Bingham wrote episodes for the TV series Play for Today, Three Comedies of Marriage, Yes, Honestly and Robin's Nest. During the 1980s and 1990s she continuted to write for the occasional TV series, and in 1993 adapted Jilly Cooper's novel Riders for the small screen.

Since the 1980s Bingham has become a romance novelist, writing novels including To Hear a Nightingale, The Business and In Sunshine or in Shadow. Most of her books are set in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1996 she won the Best Romantic Novel Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association.