Marriage met the English journalist Edmund Garrett (1865–1907) while they were both patients at a Suffolk sanatorium in 1901, he with tuberculosis, she with neurasthenia.
[1] A. R. Waller, a critic who was a neighbour of the Marriage family, suggested she do translations when he proposed to the London publisher J. M. Dent that his firm embark on the first complete edition of Balzac's immense novel cycle La Comédie humaine.
[3] Marriage earned only about £3–4 a week while she worked on the project, but put an effort into ensuring it was readable and accurate that was unusual for translators in that period.
[1] Marriage also wrote for the daily press, often anonymously and mainly on Balkan affairs, helped by the fact that her sister Elizabeth had married a Bulgarian diplomat, Constantin Mincoff.
She was related by marriage to Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and showed interest in the women's suffrage movement.