Spinal meningitis in infancy and a fall when she was seventeen left Alice Nourse with frail health and back trouble which caused her to be semi-invalid at periods throughout her life.
She first traveled to China in 1908 to visit her sister Mary, who taught at a girls' school in Hangzhou, and returned two years later to take up a post at the same establishment.
After marrying Earle Tisdale Hobart, a Standard Oil Company executive, in Tientsin in 1914, she traveled to northeast China and in 1916 published an article on her experiences at the hands of Honghuzi bandits in The Atlantic Monthly.
[2] Her fictional account of her experiences in China, not surprisingly, focused on the role played by Western businessmen, especially those engaged in importing and selling petroleum products.
After making her home in California in the 1940s, her subject matter expanded to encompass contemporary Mexico in The Peacock Sheds His Tail (1945) and Californian agrarian life in The Cup and the Sword (1942) and The Cleft Rock (1948).