Joyce was born in Calcutta, India, of British colonial parents, Eustace and Constance Hardinge. She spent her childhood years in India and then attended school at Stanborough College in Watford, England. She completed a teacher's degree (L.R.A.M.) at the Royal Academy of Music in London and then returned to teach at Stanborough.

Robert Sidney Joyce, an Irishman who had been born in Belfast, met her while a student at SC. They became engaged and married in 1927. During the next seventeen years, he experienced considerable success as an evangelist and then became president of the South England Conference in 1935 and the North England Conference in 1939.

In 1947, the Joyces accepted an invitation to serve at the Boulder, Colorado, Seventh-day Adventist church in the Central Union in the U.S. Two years later, he became the pastor of the Union College church in Lincoln, Nebraska, and she began teaching piano as an instructor at the college, rising to the rank of assistant professor in her seven years there.

During their stay in Lincoln, he became president of the Nebraska Conference. They then returned to the Colorado Conference where he served as president, and then settled in the Lake Union, where he served as president of the Indiana Conference. A year following his death in 1969, she died as a result of an automobile accident in Loma Linda, California, at age 68.