A Han Chinese who belonged to the Bordered Yellow Banner, he became a Fellow of the Hanlin Academy in 1801.
In 1791, together with his partner Cheng Weiyuan (程偉元), he "recovered" the last forty chapters of Cao Xueqin's monumental novel Dream of the Red Chamber (sometimes called The Story of the Stone).
The nature and extent of his contributions to the work and the sources of his material are a matter of controversy, but it is believed by a large number of modern orthodox Redologists that the last forty chapters were not written by Cao Xueqin.
In 1921, Hu Shih proposed that the last forty chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber were written by Gao E himself.
Gao and Cheng's continuation is believed by some as a conspiracy by the Qing dynasty imperial court to hide the semi-autobiographical nature of the novel, which involves the politics of the Yongzheng era.