She assisted her father and her husband, Alexander Hosie, with their writing but when they died she published books on her own account.

Her parents were Lucy and William Edward Soothill; her father was a Methodist missionary.

[1] Her parents wanted to call her Dorothy but the British diplomat who registered her birth decided that Dorothea was much better.

He was also the author of Three Years in Western China (1890) and On the Trail of Opium Poppy (2 vols., 1914).

In the year before her husband died she published Two Gentlemen of China[4] and she wrote more on her own account.

[5] She edited her father William Edward Soothill's translation of the Analects of Confucius which was published by Oxford University Press in 1937.