Mary Marshall (née Paley; 24 October 1850 – 19 March 1944)[1] was a British economist who in 1874 was one of the first women to take the Tripos examination at Cambridge University – although, as a woman, she was excluded from receiving a degree.

In 1871, she won a scholarship to the newly founded Newnham College, Cambridge, becoming one of the first five students accepted to study there.

[6] She took the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1874, sitting the examinations along with her peer Amy Bulley in Marion and Benjamin Hall Kennedy's drawing room.

Her examiners Alfred Marshall, Henry Sidgwick, John Venn and Sedley Taylor awarded her a pass with honours, though as a woman she was debarred from formally graduating and receiving an official degree.

[5] In 1876, Paley became engaged to Alfred Marshall who had been her economics tutor, and was at that time a strong supporter of higher education for women.

[8] In 1883 she followed him to Oxford, before the couple returned to Cambridge where they built and moved into Balliol Croft on Madingley Road (renamed Marshall House in 1991).

[11] According to James and Julianne Cicarelli in Distinguished Women Economists, John Maynard Keynes "held her in the highest regard and considered her an intellectual and thinker every bit as significant to the historical development of economics as her husband or any of the other economists about whom he wrote.”[3] After her husband died in 1924, Mary became Honorary Librarian of the Marshall Library of Economics at Cambridge, to which she donated her husband's collection of articles and books on economics.