Mary Paley Marshall entered the world on the 24th of October 1850 in the village of Ufford near Stamford within Lincolnshire. Her father served as the Reverend Thomas Paley who held the position of Rector there.
The year 1874 marked a pivotal moment for women at Cambridge University when Mary took the Moral Sciences Tripos examination that year. She sat alongside another woman named Amy Bulley inside the drawing room of Marion and Benjamin Hall Kennedy.
Mary established herself financially as the first woman lecturer at Cambridge University in 1875 when she was twenty-five years old. She began teaching economics at Newnham College while wearing clothes made from fashionable Pre-Raphaelite prints.
Alfred Marshall grew increasingly obstructive toward the cause of higher education for women and believed that women had nothing useful to say about academic matters. A regulation passed in 1897 prevented women from being awarded a degree by Cambridge so Mary never publicly disagreed with her husband's support for this discrimination.
Mary passed away on the 19th of March 1944 at the age of ninety-three. Her ashes were scattered in the garden of her home after she lived there until her death.