Mary Paley

Mary Marshall
crop from painting by AS or SA
Born	Mary Paley 24 October 1850 Lincolnshire, England
Died	1944
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Cambridge University
Occupation	Economist
Employer	University College, Bristol, Oxford, The Marshall Library of Economics
Known for	One of the first women to study at Cambridge University.
Spouse(s)	Alfred Marshall

Mary Marshall (24 October 1850 – 1944), née Paley, was an economist and one of the first women to take the Tripos examination and to study at Newnham College as part of Cambridge University.

Paley was born in Lincolnshire, England, a daughter of Rev. Thomas Paley, Rector of Ufford, and a great-granddaughter of the eighteenth-century theologian and philosopher William Paley. She was educated at home, excelling in languages: in 1871, after performing well in rigorous entrance exams, she earned a scholarship to become one of the first five students at the recently founded Newnham College in Cambridge. She took the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1874, and was classed between a first and second-class, though as a woman she was debarred from graduation. Paley sat the exam with Amy Bulley. They were some of the first women to take tripos examinations and they sat the exams in Marion and Benjamin Hall Kennedy's drawing room. Paley described Professor Kennedy as excitable, but he would sometimes doze whilst invigilating. The only evidence she was given of her work was a confidential letter from her examiners. Women sitting the tripos examination was a milestone for Cambridge University and the importance can be gauged by the people involved. The people who delivered Paley and Bulley's papers were Alfred Marshall, Henry Sidgwick, John Venn and Sedley Taylor.

From 1875 to 1876 she was a Lecturer at Newnham.

In 1876, she became engaged to Alfred Marshall who had been her economics tutor. In 1878 they moved to found the teaching of economics at University College, Bristol. In 1883 she followed him to Oxford, before the couple returned to Cambridge in 1885 where they built and moved into Balliol Croft, renamed Marshall House in 1991). Mary lectured on economics herself, and was asked to develop a book from her Cambridge lectures. Mary and Alfred wrote The Economics of Industry together, published in 1879. Alfred disliked the book, however, and it eventually went out of print, even with moderate demand for it.