Hildegard Marsden (nee von Boetticher) was born in Germany in 1920 and moved to the United States with her family. In 1941 while attending Randolph College in Virginia her family was deported back to Germany where she worked in a censoring office in Berlin. After the war Marsden worked a liaison between the German government and the Americans and British and during this time she met her future husband British officer Horace Marsden. The couple immigrate to Canada in 1951 and settled in Waterloo Region with their three children. Marsden began taking classes at Waterloo College and was the first woman in the region to return to university as a mature student with children.
In 1959 she graduated with her BA from Randolph College and went to on to obtain an MA from the University of Waterloo. She was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages in 1965 and in 1967 she was appointed Dean of Women. Marsden died in 1988.