She was born into a prominent Anglo-Jewish family, the granddaughter of Sir Robert Waley Cohen and Lord Nathan.
When she moved with her husband to the United States, she could not practice law, and enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Yale University, receiving her degree in 1987.
[citation needed] Waley-Cohen's books include The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (I.B.
Tauris, 2006); The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (W.W. Norton, 1999); and Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758-1820 (Yale University Press, 1991).
Nicholas D. Kristof welcomed Sextants in the New York Times as "sensibly organized and engagingly told" but "In the end, I disagreed with much of the thesis of this book, but that is not to say that I disliked it.