Marilyn Yalom

Who is Marilyn Yalom?

Marilyn Yalom is a feminist author and historian. She is a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She served as the institute's director from 1984 to 1985.

She is married to the psychiatrist and author Irvin Yalom.

Her writing Birth of the Chess Queen was inspired by, on a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, seeing a small carved ivory image of a Madonna and Child, described as a chess piece; she concluded that it was intended as a devotional object but had been made by an ivory carver accustomed to making chess pieces.