Marion Elizabeth Blake was born on March 23, 1892 in New Britain, Connecticut to Arthur C. and Elizabeth Snow Blake. She attended New Haven High School and arrived at Mount Holyoke College in 1909, earning her B.A. in 1913 with majors in Greek and Latin. She earned her M.A. (1917) and her Ph.D. (1921) from Cornell University. Blake was a teacher at Wethersfield (Connecticut) High School, 1913-1917; an instructor of Latin and Greek at Illinois College, Jacksonville, Illinois, 1921-1922; an assistant and associate professor of Greek and Latin at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1922-1928; an associate professor of Greek at Mount Holyoke College, 1929-1936; an associate professor of Art and Archaeology at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia, 1936; a Latin professor at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina, 1937-1938; and a research associate on Roman Archaeology at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C., 1938-1947. She then worked and lived in Rome, Italy as a researcher at the American Academy Library, where she studied Roman construction from 1947 to 1961. Blake died in Rome on September 11, 1961 at the age of seventy-three.
From the guide to the Blake papers MS 0721., ca. 1913-1964., (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)
