Eldest daughter of a Glasgow merchant, Marion Kirkland married Hugo Reid in 1839. Kirkland Reid attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 where she witnessed the exclusion of the female delegates from America. Spurred on by "the scornful sneers" of those who "condescend to notice such opinions as mine, " Reid penned A Plea for Woman (1843) which was immediately transported across the Atlantic and published in the US in 1845 under that title. American editions of 1847, 1848, 1851, and 1852 were published under the name Woman, her Education and Influence. The drawing of her in the 1847 edition of Woman, Her Education and Influence indicates a young woman, possibly in her twenties or early thirties. Reid was widowed in 1872. McFadden in Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth Century Feminism states that Finnish Baroness Aleksandra Gripenberg met Reid in 1889. That is about all that is known about Reid's life. Historians are not even sure of her birth and death dates.