Born in Montreal on 28 November 1913, Joyce Marshall only slowly established the literary reputation she enjoys in the 1980s. Publishing as early as 1936, she was appreciated first as a meticulous prose stylist, and in due course she came to be known as a sensitive translator. But the literary form at which she excelled, the short story, was long dismissed as a minor genre, and for several decades many critics considered the subjects she frankly addressed (urban violence, female sexuality) to be irreconcilable with received definitions of art. Hence until the 1980s she occupied only a small space in literary history, an estimation that is being rectified as the body of her work is being anthologized, collected, and reread.

Her father, William Wallace Marshall, was a stocks-and-bonds dealer and an amateur singer. He and his wife, Ruth Winifred Chambers Marshall, had five children (four girls and a boy); they are...