The daughter of Evan Ebenezer Biss, Inspector of Schools in the Colonial and Indian Service, and Amelia Bagshaw Johnstone.
Her marriage in 1938 to the late Graham Spry, and subsequent births of their three children, Robin, Richard and Lib, interrupted her academic career.
However, during World War II she did serve actively on the Wartime Prices and Trade Board and its later affiliate, the Commodity Prices Stabilization Corporation, in Ottawa and, during the early postwar years, went to England and co-founded Saskatchewan House with her husband, broadcast reformer Graham Spry, who was Agent-General for Saskatchewan in London from 1946 to 1967.
Throughout her retirement years, she maintained a strong intellectual presence at the University of Ottawa, and could be seen regularly at the National Archives of Canada with a magnifying glass to compensate for her worsening eyesight.
In addition to Spry's authoritative work on the Palliser Expedition, her research on how the Canadian prairies transitioned from a commons to open access resources and, finally, to private property helped extend a branch of work often well-known even beyond the disciplines of economics and history, for instance in the prominence given Innis and the staples thesis in Canadian communications thought.