in Aleksandrovka village in the Nerekhtsky Uyezd of the Kostroma Governorate of the Russian Empire to Alexandra Petrovna (née Boltina) and Nikolai P. Makarov [ru].

Her father, owned a small estate as a member of the gentry and was a noted actor, composer, lexicographer, and writer.

Her mother died when she was six years old, and Makarova was sent in 1845 to study at one of the only girls' schools in the Russian Empire,[1] the Elizabeth Institute of Noble Maidens [ru] in Moscow.

[2] The purpose of the cooperative was to create a means for financial independence for women and Engelgardt began publishing translations, including works of Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Émile Zola, and others.

[3][6] In 1870, Engelhardt and her husband were both arrested for participation in the socialist students' circle of the Saint Petersburg Agricultural Institute (Russian: Санкт-Петербургский земледельческий институ)(ru).

Her husband spent eighteen months in prison and was then exiled for life from Saint Petersburg and banished to his estate near Batishchevo [ru] in the Smolensk Oblast.

[6][7] She worked on a series of educational publications in the 1870s, including Essays on the Institutional Life of Bygone Times (Russian: Ocherki Institutskoi Zhizni Bylogo Vremeni, 1870) and The Complete German–Russian Dictionary (Russian: Polnyi Nemetsko–Russkii Slovar, 1877) and at the end of that decade was one of the people involved in founding the Bestuzhev Courses to give women access to higher education opportunities.