Considered an early feminist and called "a forgotten American literary treasure" by The New Yorker magazine, she was the author of over 50 books and more than 200 articles and short stories.

She was the first woman to receive a degree in Mining Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then after living in Florence and London in the mid-1920s, she traveled to the Belgian Congo and hiked across Central Africa in the 1930s.

In 1935 she traveled to Shanghai, where she taught English for three years and became involved with prominent figures, such as The Soong Sisters and the Chinese poet, Shao Xunmei (Sinmay Zau).

[5] Her academic accomplishments were a testament to her intelligence and persistence so that her lab partner grudgingly admitted, "You ain't so dumb!

"[2] In 1924, prior to graduating from mining engineering school, she traveled 2,400 miles (3,900 km) across the United States in a Model T-Ford dressed as a man with her friend, Dorothy Raper.

Supporting herself as a writer for The New Yorker, she lived in an apartment in Shanghai's red light district, and became romantically involved with the Chinese poet and publisher Shao Xunmei (Sinmay Zau).

[6][7] He gave her the entrée that enabled her to write a biography of the famous Soong sisters, one of whom was married to Sun Yat-sen and another to Chiang Kai-shek.

After moving to Hong Kong, she began an affair with Charles Boxer, the local head of British army intelligence.

When the Japanese marched into Hong Kong a few weeks later Boxer was imprisoned in a POW camp, and Hahn was brought in for questioning.

[citation needed] She was not interned since she had stated she was legally married to Shao Xunmei on a document, and therefore the Japanese treated her as, in the words of Taras Grescoe of The New Yorker, "an honorary Asian".

Finding family life too constraining, however, in 1950 Hahn took an apartment in New York, and from then on visited her husband and children in England only occasionally.

She continued to write articles for The New Yorker, as well as biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Aphra Behn, James Brooke, Fanny Burney, Chiang Kai-shek, D. H. Lawrence, and Mabel Dodge Luhan.

[1] "Chances are, your grandmother didn't smoke cigars and let you hold wild role-playing parties in her apartment", said her granddaughter Alfia Vecchio Wallace in her affectionate eulogy of Hahn.