Martines never married—a fact that may have helped her pursuit of music, but also put her in a marginalised position in marriage-obsessed eighteenth-century Vienna, where great limitations of freedom and mobility were placed on unmarried women. Women in her position were not encouraged to make their preferences known or take any steps themselves to pursue a potential husband for fear of ruining their reputation. While there is nothing to suggest that Martines bemoaned her unmarried status, Metastasio noted in his testament how fortune did not do any favours to Marianna and her sister, leaving them to rely both on his financial support and their irreproachable reputation. Martines instead kept house for her eldest brother, Joseph Martines, and cohabitated with her sister Antonia until the day she died. Joseph enjoyed a slow moving but rewarding career at the Court Library and was instrumental in securing himself and his siblings their elevation into lower-ranking nobility (Ritterstand) in 1774. While the Martines siblings were born into a (quasi) middle-class family without great financial means, their striving for social mobility dictated much of their decision making.  Indeed, Martines appears to have been a master of toeing the line between what we might nowadays term ambition and a display of demure humility; perfectly balancing educated sociability and politeness while pursuing excellence without transgressing beyond what would be deemed ‘proper’ for a woman of her station. This meant that, unlike other women who were born into middle-class families, Martines never performed publicly. Instead, she used the liminal space of her salons to inhabit her multi-role identity of a composer- performer. Her only quasi-public appearances were as a composer of sacred music, which allowed for performances of at least one of her masses or oratorios.