How to use a library
Mary Paley Marshall, political economist, author and librarian
Hello and welcome! Most UK universities around this time have their university inductions and freshers’ weeks (though Cambridge’s term doesn’t start until October). This is a short post about Mary Paley Marshall (1850-1944). In the 1870s she was one of Cambridge University’s earliest women students and the first of two women ever to sit for its final year exams. That was just the start of it. She then became one of the first women lecturers at Cambridge, Bristol and Oxford universities, and co-authored, with her husband Alfred Marshall, The Economics of Industry (1879). Most of her life was spent teaching political economics to women students and helping her husband to write his books, but following his death she had a remarkable late-life blossoming that was all her own.
When Alfred Marshall, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, died in 1924 after a long illness, his wife and fellow economist Mary Paley Marshall was 74. She had long dedicated her life to teaching women students in Cambridge, Oxford and Bristol Universities and helping her husband to write his books.1 Her friends assumed that now she would devote her remaining years to travelling, painting her beloved water-colours and playing music. But Mary had other ideas.
Alfred had left money and his large collection of economics books to the university, and it was agreed that a new library would be established in his honour. The Marshall Library of Economics would be combined with the Departmental Library of Economics which J.M. Keynes had run since 1909 (more on the Marshall Library’s history here).
Mary immediately donated £1,000 of her own money towards establishing the new library, and arranged to pay a further £250 a year to maintain it. The only thing she asked for was that the library should be accessible to women and men equally, and that she herself should be employed there on a volunteer basis. For years she and Alfred had welcomed his students into their home at Balliol Croft on leafy Madingley Road in Cambridge. After drinking tea (served by Mary) and discussing economics with Professor Marshall (Mary kept quiet) the young men would leave with armfuls of borrowed books.
But no one knew the collection better than Mary Paley Marshall, and in 1925, at the age of 75, she began working as Honorary Assistant Librarian at the Marshall Library. Every weekday morning she could be seen cycling from Madingley Road along the leafy college Backs, to the library’s original premises on Downing Street, later on West Road. Paley Marshall was easily recognizable by her colourful scarves and the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ sandals she wore in all weathers.
Sitting at the library’s front desk, she would greet each student by their name and offer suggestions about the most useful books and articles to consult. Her friend, the historian G.M. Trevelyan said that ‘nothing escaped her clear, penetrating and truthful eye’. Paley Marshall’s favourite job was carefully cataloguing the books by author and subject on handwritten index cards in the special ‘brown boxes’ she and Alfred had devised together. For many years they formed the library’s main catalogue, and can still be seen there.
Mary Paley Marshall reluctantly gave up her job aged 87 when her doctor, fearful of her cycling in increasing Cambridge traffic, insisted on it. When she died in 1944 she left £10,000 to the University, ‘for the development and increased usefulness of the Marshall Library’.
Nowadays, the Marshall Library is housed in a 1960s building on Sidgwick Avenue. Its website has excellent online induction sessions for new students, teaching them about how to navigate both the collection and the online cataloguing system. But I suspect that most freshers will still need to ask a librarian for advice. And as they walk up the stairs with their books, the students will see two portraits watching over them: Alfred Marshall’s on one side, and Mary Paley Marshall’s on the other.
‘I think his second attempt at my head is successful’, Mary wrote of her portrait by Roger Fry (his first attempt was not a good enough likeness). ‘It is now in the Marshall Library & the charwomen & the carpenters like it as well as Dr Clapham, Mr Austin Robinson & Mr Keynes. So I think it will now pass the committee & I am ever so glad.’2
With her penetrating but kindly gaze, Mary Paley Marshall continues to watch over and guide each new generation of students who use the Marshall Library.
Sources: My thanks to C.L. Trowell (Marshall Librarian) and to Anne Thomson (former Newnham College Archivist). Mary Paley Marshall’s letters and documents can be found at Newnham College, Cambridge and at the Marshall Library. Mary Paley Marshall, What I remember (CUP, 1947).
October’s book club
I’m delighted to announce that our book club now features in
’s fantastic Book Club Directory. October’s book club choice will be The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, first published in 1922. Perhaps you’ve seen the film, or read the book ages ago, but I URGE you to read it again and the Oxford World’s Classics paperback pictured here is simply the best recent edition. (It’s also very cheap to buy secondhand, and free via Kindle or online.) I’ll write more about how the book club will work next week, and meanwhile I’m very much hoping you’ll join us!A good day for the diaeresis
24th September was National Punctuation Day in the USA (or should I say U.S.A.?) so it was apt that this story about the Brontës followed soon afterwards. There can be little doubt that the sisters deserve to have their name properly memorialised in Westminster Abbey, but does the diaeresis exist elsewhere? ‘Most of the English-speaking world finds the diaeresis inessential,’ writes Mary Norris in Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (2016). ‘The New Yorker may be the only publication in America that uses it regularly. It’s actually a lot of trouble, these days, to get the diaeresis to stick over the vowel.’ (Excerpt from Merriam Webster’s blog here).
There’s always useful advice from
on how to apply punctuation: ‘Whenever I want to type a clipped word that begins with an apostrophe, like ’stack (or, if you’re reading this a hundred years ago, ’flu, ’phone, or ’bus), my pet method is to type an x, then the apostrophe, and then the word, and then obliterate the x, which takes us from, for instance, x’stack to ’stack.’Do you have strong feelings about dots, dashes and apostrophes? Is there any change you think of as positive? I’m all for keeping apostrophes in the right place, but (full disclosure) happy sometimes not to have to add all those pesky full stops after capital letter abbreviations. It’s now acceptable to write USA and UK, PhD and DPhil (even in Oxbridge publications) and full stops are increasingly dropped in names like EM Forster (though I did use them here). But would TS Eliot or AS Byatt approve, do you think?
Recommended reading this week
It’s usually students that get all the advice during Freshers’ week. In this post
, Head of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton, offers refreshing words to lecturers and teachers instead: ‘One thing I remind myself — and this goes for the early classes of this term as well as induction day itself — is not to make this mistake — Don’t preempt the experience of any student. Don’t pretend to know them before you know them.’’s Substack ‘dispatches from my hospital bed’ is consistently funny, memorable and moving. ‘My dear friend moves from the kitchen to my bedside,’ he writes in this week’s post, ‘feeding me wine and talking about how Freud travelled second class, and Jung first, when they went to the US together in 1909, and how enraged this made Freud. Receiving friends in bed has become my new normal, and it is beautiful in its ordinariness.’ Kureishi’s memoir Shattered is now available for pre-order.I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1920s this week for The Enchanted April book club, so loved reading
’s ‘Bright Young Things’ and ’s ‘Yes Darlint be Jealous’. Gwen Raverat’s wood-engravings are described beautifully in ’s ‘Out of the shadows’. Below is my post about Raverat’s Period Piece, released from the paywall this week.Gwen Raverat's House by the River
‘This is a circular book,’ the artist and writer Gwen Raverat explains at the start of her much-loved memoir, Period Piece. ‘It does not begin at the beginning and go on to the end; it is all going on at the same time, sticking out like the spokes of a wheel from the hub, which…
Thank you so much for reading, sharing and subscribing. Coming soon on Cambridge Ladies Dining Society:
The unlikely lexicographer, Robert Burchfield, 20th-century editor of the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Dr Susila Bonnerjee (1872-1920), one of the first Indian women to study at Cambridge.
Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics was published in 1890. ‘However, we are in possession of one of the proof books,’ the Marshall Librarian Clare Trowell writes on her blog, ‘and we can see how much Mary contributed to the editing of this great work from her handwriting in the margins.’ (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/marshall/1, accessed 28.9.24) According to a recent LSE review, ‘Mary Paley Marshall’s input went into shaping Alfred Marshall’s publications but she remained vastly under-recognised.’
CUL, Add. 9368.1:11523
Absolutely loved this, Ann. That portrait says everything: strong jaw, large hands, and the eyes that see exactly who you are. The lace scarf. I have my own thoughts about that and do not want to hear otherwise. Side note: my husband was a university librarian and a woodworker. When the old oak card catalogs were being decommissioned, he took several of them home. He made ingenious pieces of furniture from them, using extra card drawers throughout the house. I don’t know what “pre-Raphaelite” sandals are, but I want a pair.
Thanks for the article on Paley Marshall - very interesting! Great that you will discuss von Arnim, The Enchanted April. The new edition of the book is edited by Isobel Maddison, Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College and published by Oxford World’s Classics. It is worth getting this edition which has scholarly footnotes and a very readable and informative introduction. Might I mention that Isobel will co-teach a course on von Arnim for us at Literature Cambridge - EvA: Men, Women and Dogs, Oct-Dec. 2025. https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/von-arnim-2025