Marshall was born in
Oakland, California. Her mother was a book designer; her father worked in city government. Marshall came East to attend
Bennington College as a literature and music major, but she left college without finishing and later enrolled at
Harvard College, where she studied with poets
Robert Lowell,
Elizabeth Bishop,
Robert Fitzgerald, and
Jane Shore. She earned a BA degree in 1977 and was elected to
Phi Beta Kappa. Before turning to writing, Marshall worked in the publishing industry and taught. From 1980 to 2007, she was married to author
John Sedgwick. Her first book, published in 1984, was
The Cost of Loving: Women and the New Fear of Intimacy, which examines the impact of the
feminist movement on its followers. Marshall is particularly interested in uncovering and exploring the lives of women who have been forgotten by traditional historians and biographers. Supported by grants and teaching, she worked on the book
The Peabody Sisters for nearly 20 years, reading original letters and documents as well as delving into the newspapers and literature of the era. The book focused on the lives of
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody,
Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, and
Sophia Hawthorne. Her second biography is
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. In a conversation in Radcliffe Magazine with author
Margot Livesey, Marshall spoke about the connection between the two biographies: "I wrote The Peabody Sisters partly to prove that the New England Transcendentalists included other brilliant women besides Fuller. Then I discovered that during the 20 years I’d spent researching the Peabodys, Fuller had been largely forgotten. No one recognized her name anymore. This was a shock to me, and a loss I wanted to repair." In addition to her books, Marshall writes occasionally for
The New Yorker,
Slate,
The New York Times Book Review,
The London Review of Books, and other publications. She was a fellow at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2006–07, and writes book reviews for Radcliffe Magazine. Since 2007 she has been assistant professor in writing, Literature & Publishing at
Emerson College. Marshall lives in Belmont,
Massachusetts. ==Books==