Edith, the younger of the two daughters of the lawyer and art collector Alfred Spitzer and his wife Hermine, née Spitzer, studied physics and chemistry at the University of Vienna after attending grammar school and an advanced training course, where she graduated in 1927. On 3 October 1927, she married the future theologian and pastor Friedrich (“Fritz”) Neumann. Between 1929 and 1938, the Doctor of Physics found employment with various companies in Vienna, for example as a secretary or French correspondent. Her activities were interrupted by a two-year stay in Zagreb, where her husband Friedrich Neumann worked as a missionary. Edith was baptized at the St. Chrischona Pilgrim Mission in Vienna in 1934.

After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, Edith Neumann was subjected to persecution by the Nazi regime due to her Jewish origins. Together with her husband, she fled Vienna on 26 August 1938, on a Danube cargo ship bound for Yugoslavia, eventually reaching Kent via London. With the help of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews, which provided Fritz Neumann with a position as a missionary in Haifa, the couple arrived in Palestine, where they remained until 1948. During this time, Edith worked in the British Chief Censors Office in Jerusalem, after the end of the war first as a chemistry and German teacher at a school for boys, then as a technical laboratory assistant in a military hospital in Haifa, before finding work in a medical laboratory at a refinery. On 30 January 1948, the Neumann couple finally emigrated to the USA and – like Edith's sister Hanna Spitzer – settled in New York. In the decades that followed, Edith Neumann found work as a bacteriologist at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, eventually moving to Maimonides Hospital to work as a microbiologist. After the death of Fred Neumann – as Fritz called himself in the USA – in 1967, Edith moved to Manhattan and worked as medical director of the Jetti Katz Clinical Laboratory until the ripe old age of 80.

In 1963, Edith Neumann received compensation from the Fund for Assistance to Politically Persecuted Persons and in 1996 from the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism. In 1998, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art 1st Class. The two sisters presumably divided up their father Alfred Spitzer's extensive art collection, which is said to have comprised more than 800 objects, before fleeing Vienna. Part of the collection ended up in New York with Hanna Spitzer and finally Edith Neumann. However, the majority of the collection, which was supposed to be sent by the forwarding company Zdenko Dworak from Vienna, was allegedly lost when a bomb hit the company's depot. Edith Neumann died in New York on 29 June 2002. In her will, Neumann bequeathed 107 works of art to Bard College in New York and two drawings by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka from her father Alfred Spitzer's collection to the Albertina.