Emilie Mayer was the fourth child of the council pharmacist August Friedrich Mayer (1777-1840) and his wife Henrietta Carolina Louisa, née Maas (1790-1814) who was a postal administrator's daughter from Strelitz. Two brothers later became pharmacists in Stettin.

She received her first piano lessons at age five from a Friedland organist and was a student of Carl Loewe in Stettin in the early 1840s. She completed further musical studies (probably from 1847 in Berlin under Adolf Bernhard Marx, among others) and traveled to Vienna, Halle, Hamburg, Pasewalk, and Stettin. Later she lived in Berlin with occasional longer stays in Stettin.

Emilie Mayer kept her own open house in Berlin and maintained contacts with important figures in social and aristocratic life. She found her final resting place in the ''Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof I Cemetery'' in Berlin-Kreuzberg. For a long time, the exact location of the grave was presumed to be forgotten. In 2018, pianist Kyra Steckeweh, filmmaker Tim van Beveren, and historian Jörg Kuhn succeeded in locating her grave site in the course of researching and filming the documentary film
Female Composers (which deals, among other things, with the life and work of the composer).

Works
Emilie Mayer left behind an extensive body of musical work, which is thoroughly described by Almut Runge-Woll, giving the locations and publishers.[2] She composed eight symphonies, twelve string quartets, piano chamber music, fifteen concert overtures, violin and cello sonatas, piano works, the Singspiel ''Die Fischerin'' after Goethe, songs, and four-part choruses. Her compositions were largely forgotten after her death.