As a young girl, Mary Alice LeGrow was not interested in comics since she grew up in Weisbaden, Germany where comics were not readily available. In her freshman year of high school, she discovered comics and anime. She enjoyed manga because it was not "the regular colorful spandex superhero fare". She heard about Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga competition from a friend at the 2003 Otakon, an anime convention in Baltimore, Maryland. On the drive from the convention and with eleven days before the deadline, she chose a short story she had written named "Nikolai", because of its "simple but engaging plot that had a definite start and finish." She renamed the main character, Sally Notch, after a road sign called "Notch Road" and based her character design on a model in a Gothic & Lolita Bible. Because the story was ten pages longer than the twenty-page limit, she rewrote it and also altered Sally's hair and clothes "to make her more interesting". "Nikolai" won a runner-up place in the competition and was published in the 2003 Rising Stars of Manga anthology. Along with a monetary prize, LeGrow won a chance to potientally have a manga series published by Tokyopop. The editors liked the series she proposed, Bizenghast, and she became the second Rising Stars of Manga winner to have a manga series published by Tokyopop.

She cites Uzumaki, Spirit of Wonder, Thieves and Kings, Will Eisner, and the original Sherlock Holmes comics as influencing her as an author. LeGrow lived in Germany and Connecticut and her work shows influences from "a combination of the German language, art and architecture, as well as the ghost stories and legends of New England". She is also a fan of the manga artist Mitsukazu Mihara.