Marianne Novy received an A.M. from Harvard in 1967 and a Ph. D. from Yale in 1973, both in English Literature. From 1971 until 2016, she taught at the University of Pittsburgh in the English Department. She became affiliated with the Women's Studies program when it began a few years later and continued as it became the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. After teaching and writing on Shakespeare and women writers, she began to teach and write on adoption and its literary representations. Her edited collection Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2001) was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She also published Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories (Temple University Press, 2024), and co-founded the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture.