Miriam Markel-Mosessohn was born in Volkovyshki, Congress Poland, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant, Shimon Wierzbolowki, and his wife Ḥayyah.

[1] She had two brothers, Yosef and Shmuel, and a sister, Devorah; both the daughters and the sons of the family attended the local Jewish school, where they learned to read and write Hebrew; although she did not attend ḥeder – the traditional elementary school where young boys studied the chumash (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) – her father hired a private tutor so that she could pursue her desire to study scripture.

[1] Over the course of her life Markel-Mosessohn corresponded with three prominent maskilim – her male colleagues in the Hebrew revival – Abraham Mapu, Judah Leib Gordon, and Moses Lilienblum.

[3]: 31 Markel-Mosessohn wrote to Judah Leib Gordon for the first time in 1868, after she had completed a draft of the first part of Ha-Yehudim be-Angliya, her translation of Francolm's work.

[3]: 35,37  In 1875 Gordon dedicated to her his poem "Kotzo shel yud" ('The tip of the [letter] yud'), which evokes empathy for a modern-day woman trapped by oppressive strictures of Jewish law..[3]: 14-15, 24  Two years later she acknowledged the honour, while writing to him for moral support, at a time when her husband had been imprisoned in connection with questionable financial dealings.

[3]: 39 During the 1870s Markel-Mosessohn became more involved than before in her husband's business affairs, and moved several times, at one point staying three years in Danzig, and finally settling in Vienna in 1881.

[6][3]: 40  Between May and July 1887 she published four progressively more developed articles, the last two being, respectively, a report detailing the appearance of political anti-Semitism during the latest Hungarian elections in the village of Tiszaeszlár, where a blood libel had occurred five years before, in 1892; and a feuilleton about summer in Vienna, and Viennese Jewry more generally.