Ursula K. Le Guin has called her "a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.

She was married to the artist and experimental filmmaker Ed Emshwiller and "regularly served as his model for paintings of beautiful women.

The couple studied at the École Nationale Superiéure des Beaux-Arts, toured Europe on a motorcycle, and eventually settled in Levittown, New York.

[citation needed] She died on February 2, 2019, in Durham, North Carolina, where she was living with her daughter, Susan.

Emshwiller’s stories appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ninth Letter, Century, Scifiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, TriQuarterly, Transatlantic Review, McSweeney’s, Orbit, Epoch, The Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, and many other anthologies and magazines.