Born in St Ive, near Liskeard in Cornwall, she was the daughter of Caroline (née Trelawny) and Reginald Hobhouse, an Anglican rector and the first Archdeacon of Bodmin.

When her father died in 1895, she went to Minnesota in the United States to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there, the trip having been organised by the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

They droop in the terrible heat, and with the insufficient unsuitable food; whatever you do, whatever the authorities do, and they are, I believe, doing their best with very limited means, it is all only a miserable patch on a great ill. Thousands, physically unfit, are placed in conditions of life which they have not strength to endure.

The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out.Imagine the heat outside the tents and the suffocation inside!

...the sun blazed through the single canvas, and the flies lay thick and black on everything; no chair, no table, nor any room for such; only a deal box, standing on its end, served as a wee pantry.

I propose, therefore, to give each tent a pail or crock, and get a proclamation issued that all drinking water must be boiled.Above all one would hope that the good sense, if not the mercy, of the English people, will cry out against the further development of this cruel system which falls with crushing effect upon the old, the weak, and the children.

Since Old Testament days was ever a whole nation carried captive?Historian Thomas Pakenham writes of Kitchener's policy turn: No doubt the continued 'hullabaloo' at the death rate in these concentration camps, and Milner's belated agreement to take over their administration, helped changed K's mind [some time at the end of 1901].

By mid-December, at any rate, Kitchener was already circulating all column commanders with instructions not to bring in women and children when they cleared the country but to leave them with the guerrillas... Viewed as a gesture to Liberals, on the eve of the new session of Parliament at Westminster, it was a shrewd political move.

It was effective precisely because, contrary to the Liberals' convictions, it was less humane than bringing them into camps, though this was of no great concern to Kitchener.Charles Aked, a Baptist minister in Liverpool, said on 22 December 1901, Peace Sunday: "Great Britain cannot win the battles without resorting to the last despicable cowardice of the most loathsome cur on earth—the act of striking a brave man's heart through his wife's honour and his child's life.

[7] Hobhouse arrived at the camp at Bloemfontein on 24 January 1901 and was shocked by the conditions she encountered: They went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink.

The rations were extremely meagre and when, as I frequently experienced, the actual quantity dispensed fell short of the amount prescribed, it simply meant famine.

With the help of Margaret Clark she decided to set up The Boer Home Industries with the first being in Philippolis and to teach young women spinning and weaving and lace making in 1908.

She travelled to South Africa again in 1913 for the inauguration of the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein but had to stop at Beaufort West due to her failing health.

South Africa contributed liberally towards this effort, and an amount of more than £17,000 (nearly £500,000 today) was collected by Mrs. President Steyn (who was to remain a lifelong friend) and sent to Hobhouse for this purpose.

Unbeknown to her, on the initiative of Mrs R. I. Steyn, a sum of £2,300 was collected by South Africans and with that Emily purchased a house in St Ives, Cornwall, which now forms part of Porthminster Hotel.

[11] In this hotel a commemorative plaque, situated within what was her lounge, was unveiled by the South African High Commissioner, Mr Kent Durr, as a tribute to her humanitarianism and heroism during the Anglo Boer War.

[14] In 2024, a new historical attraction to honour Emily Hobhouse's life and work opened in St Ive, near Liskeard in Cornwall.