Joyce Marshall was born in Montreal in 1913. After her education at McGill University in Montreal, she moved to Toronto where she remained throughout her life. She is well known for her translation work as well as for her contributions as a freelance editor to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Her best-known translations are works of fiction by the French-Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, for which she was awarded the Canada Council Translation Prize in 1976. Her own works comprise two novels and a number of short stories, plus many journalistic texts of non-fiction.

Her first novel, Presently Tomorrow, appeared in 1946, her second novel, Lovers and Strangers, in 1957. Both novels explore new and unusual, even delicate aspects of sexual relationships in subtle language that earned substantial critical praise: “The fine prose and the subtle exploration of character and motivations that distinguish Presently Tomorrow — which achieved some notoriety on publication because of its subject matter — are noticeable once again in Lovers and Strangers” (Weaver 1997, 745). What the relationships portrayed in both novels have in common is their precarious nature and the inherent danger of emotional misunderstandings. These aspects also appear again and again in her short stories, most pointedly in “The Old Woman,” which appeared in her first short-story collection, A Private Place (1975), but was first published in 1952.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Joyce Marshall was primarily associated with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio program “CBC Wednesday Night,” which was developed by Robert Weaver in 1948 and which gave various short-story writers — among them Alice Munro and Mordecai Richler — what could be called “a listening audience” (New 2003, 173). Weaver's reputation as the patron of the Canadian short story, which he owed to his various editorships of anthologies and of the literary journal Tamarack Review, supported public recognition of the undisputed talents of these writers. Thus, when A Private Place appeared, Marshall was already a well-established Canadian fiction writer, and her collection of short stories was immediately well received.

Almost twenty years after her first success as a short-story writer, Marshall published two further collections of short fiction, Any Time at All and Other Stories in 1993 and Blood and Bone / En chair et en os in 1995. This latest collection contains seven stories in English along with their French translations, each of which was done by a different translator.