Helen Elizabeth Lawson, the second daughter of Alexander and Elizabeth De Scaife Lawson, was born in Philadelphia sometime in or about the year 1808. Her father, Alexander Lawson (1772-1846), was a successful engraver who engraved plates for such publications as Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology. Helen Lawson's formal schooling in Philadelphia remains unknown. Due to her father's engraving establishment, Helen grew up surrounded by art and natural history specimens, and was able to acquire, for a woman of her time, an unusually deep knowledge of these subjects. Described by Joseph Jones, Helen's pastor, as being "timid, distrustful of herself ... dissatisfied with her best performances", she must have been unfortunately hard on herself, as her contemporaries described her work to be "so perfect as certainly leave nothing to be desired".

Helen's father encouraged her ability to draw but seems not to have supported her learning his own craft of engraving. So Helen taught herself to engrave, and was reported to have became a skillful amateur engraver by age 16 or 17. The principal examples of her success are two engravings, of male and female rice buntings (to be found in the Alexander Lawson Scrapbooks, coll. 79), which she accurately copied from Wilson's Ornithology. Her rendering of the female bunting was published in the July 1827 issue of The Port Folio. However, the stiff posture required of Helen during the process of engraving was "injurious to her health", and consequently she was "compelled to lay aside her graver." She then turned to using pencil and watercolor. Additional works by Helen, now lost, included pen and ink drawings of Alexander Wilson's schoolhouse, a landscape and waterfall, an interior view of the engraver's room, and miniature portrait of a woman, each exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts between 1830 and 1835.

In Philadelphia, members of the Academy of Natural Sciences favored Alexander Lawson's engraving establishment. When Academy vice president George Ord republished Wilson's Ornithology, he reportedly paid Helen and her sister Malvina $5,000 to color its plates of birds, "an almost unheard of sum for two young girls to earn". A substantial part of Helen Lawson's extant work was produced for Pennsylvania conchologist and entomologist Samuel Stehman Haldeman (1812-1880), in A Monograph of the Freshwater Univalve Mollusca of the United States. A member of the Academy, Haldeman was likely steered to the Lawson family as the foremost scientific illustrators in Philadelphia. Helen's reputation for producing miniatures and sketches from nature with great perfection was an asset, because Haldeman's specimen shells rarely exceeded an inch in length. Haldeman's monograph contained a total of 39 plates. Helen colored and drew the plates, which were then engraved by Alexander and Oscar Lawson (Helen's brother).

Praise for Helen's work was given by many. Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864), editor of the American Journal of Science and Arts, noted that the illustrations for Haldeman's Monograph "are so perfect as certainly leave nothing to be desired". Augustus A. Gould (1805-1866), conchologist of the Boston Society of Natural History, wrote to Haldeman: "I looked at the beautiful pictures till my eyes were dazzled and then read the text". Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) wrote to a friend that "if [Americans] had such artists among [them] as the author of those drawings, he need bring no one from Europe to aid his interesting mission of science".

Helen's drawings also made an impact upon Boston conchologist Amos Binney (1803-1847), who had undertaken a study of air-breathing terrestrial mollusks. Binney had already begun work on his plates with an artist in Boston, but upon seeing Helen's illustrations for Haldeman, he "cancelled all the drawings that had already been made for his own, and wrote at once to procure her assistance in preparing others". This volume, The Terrestrial Air-breathing Mollusks of the United States, was ultimately brought to completion by Gould, and it was not published until 1857, four years after Lawson's death. H.A. Pilsbry stated that he considered the plates of this volume to be the finest shell illustrations ever made.

In the culminating phase of her life, Helen was nominated to the position of secretary at the Franklin Institute's School of Design for Women (which eventually merged to become the present-day Moore College of Art and Design). Her attainment of this position likely derived from her reputation as an accomplished scientific illustrator. She possessed capabilities unusual for a woman of that era, enabling her to function in the worlds of commercial art and public science. Helen Lawson contracted tuberculosis during the summer of 1852, and died January 20, 1853. She was buried beside her parents in Laurel Hill Cemetery.