Maxine Sanders was born Maxine Morris in Comberbach, Cheshire, in 1946, and was still a teenager when she was initiated into witchcraft by Alex Sanders, who was more than twenty years her senior; the couple married in 1965 and, from a London flat that quickly became the busiest initiation center in British witchcraft, ran the fast-growing practice that would be named Alexandrian Wicca after Alex. Contemporary accounts, including June Johns's 1969 biography of Alex, describe Maxine as the striking, forceful presence beside her more theatrically self-promoting husband, and within the tradition she was and still is addressed as Witch Queen, a title recognizing her own standing rather than a courtesy extended only through marriage.
The pace of initiation at the Sanders household in the mid to late 1960s was, by the standards of the older Gardnerian covens, close to reckless, bringing hundreds of newcomers into the craft in a few years and multiplying the number of working Alexandrian covens across Britain far faster than any prior tradition had spread. Maxine bore much of the practical weight of running that expansion, training initiates and maintaining the coven's ritual life, work that continued even as her marriage to Alex grew more difficult through the 1970s; the couple eventually divorced, but Maxine remained active in the Craft rather than stepping back from it.