His parents were Mary Frances FitzGerald and John Purcell. Edward FitzGerald`s original name was Edward Purcell, but when he was nine his mother inherited her father`s enormous fortune and the family adopted his family name and arms. The family owned estates in both England and Ireland. Edward FitzGerald was the seventh child in a family of eight. 

He went to King Edward VI Grammar School in Bury St Edmunds, and then he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he developed close literary friendships with William Thakeray. He later also developed friendships with Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson. 

He left Cambridge in 1830 and spent a short time in Paris. 

He returned to Suffolk and made his home there. He lived for sixteen years in a cottage on his family`s estate at Boulge in Soffolk. 

His first publication was The Meadows of Spring, a collection of verses which appeared in Hone`s Year Book in 1831. 

His parents separated, and while his father stayed on the family estate in Suffolk, his mother lived grand life in London. Edward FitzGerald stayed in London at times and escorted her to dinners and dances. However, he did not like this kind of life and began travelling around the country and visiting friends. In 1832 he met and fell in love with the 16-year-old William Kenworthy Browne on a steamship to Tenby. They spent many summers together fishing on the river Ouse. However, in 1844 William Kenworthy Browne married. Edward FitzGerald`s Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth in 1851 was a comment on English education, but also a glorification of William Kenworthy Browne. 

In 1849 Edward FitzGerald published a biography of his friend the Quaker poet Bernard Barton. On his death bed Bernard Barton had asked Edward FitzGerald to look after his daughter Lucy, and in 1856 in Edward FitzGerald and Lucy Barton married. However, the marriage lasted only a few months. 

He studied Spanish with his friend the linguist Edward Cowell, and in 1853 he published six plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. These were not liked by the critics but they were popular with the reading public and so he published two more. 

Edward Cowell also inspired Edward FitzGerald`s interest in Persian poetry and he published his version of Salámán and Absál of Jámí in 1856. He is best known for his free poetic translation, from a pencil copy made for him by Edward Cowell in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, of The Rubáiyát of `Omar Khayyám, the astronomer-poet of Persia. He first published his translation anonymously in 1859 with 75 rubáiyát (quatrains). A second revised edtion in 1868 contained 110 quatrains. Then a 1872 edition contained 101 quatrains. 

In 1859 William Kenworthy Browne was fatally injured in a riding accident, and afterwards Edward FitzGerald went to live in Lowestoft. He wrote to William Kenworthy Browne`s widow saying that he walked along the beach at night `longing for some fellow to accost me who might give me some promise of filling up a very vacant place in my heart`. At the age of fifty he fell in love with a 24-year-old fisherman Joseph Fletcher who was called Posh. Edward FitzGerald had a boat, a herring-lugger, built for him which he named Meum & Tuum (I and You). The relationship ended when Edward FitzGerald became tired of Joseph Fletcher`s drunkenness and his demands for money. 

As he became old his eyesight worsened and he got local lads to read to him. He wrote to a friend: `I am an idle fellow of a very ladylike disposition, and my friendships are more like loves, I think`. 

The character George Warrington in William Thackeray`s The History of Pendennis is partly based on Edward FitzGerald.