Bose was born in Katakhali village at Boro Baishdia, an island in the Bay of Bengal. She went to Barisal to finish her matriculation exam. At 17, she married Emadullah, the general secretary of East Pakistan Jubo League. Emadullah died from smallpox in a year while she was pregnant. After the birth of her first child Jaseem, she took a job as a dorm warden at Shadar Girls School, from where she had graduated. Later, in 1963, she married her late husband's closest friend, Swadesh Bose. The couple and Jaseem went to Cambridge, England as Swadesh won a scholarship for his Ph.D. at Cambridge University. In 1967 they moved to Karachi. Noorjahan gave birth to a daughter Monica in Cambridge, and a second daughter, Anita, in Karachi. The family moved to Dhaka in early 1971, just before the start of the liberation war. In 1974, the family moved to Oxford, England and from there to Washington, United States where Swadesh got a job with the World Bank. Noorjahan completed her master's degree in social work and began her career as a social worker with a Catholic Charities Refugee Program.