[4] She began writing as a freelancer as well, providing articles and short stories to Scribner's, Harper's, The American Mercury, and Vanity Fair.

[7] Hale was hired by the New York Times as its first woman straight news reporter in the spring of 1934, a job which she left after an exhausting six months.

[7] Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote, "Nancy Hale's clever short stories long have been one of the star attractions in The New Yorker" and that her "knowledge of the inner workings of her fellow-women's minds is almost appalling.

In 1951, she published her fourth novel, The Sign of Jonah, about a Vermont girl's married life in Virginia,[7] and in 1955, her third collection of short stories, The Empress's Ring.

[10] She once claimed to have sold the magazine a record number of stories in one year (12) and eventually published over 80, placing her among The New Yorker's most prolific fiction authors.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Beverly Grunwald wrote that Hale "has taken a 7-year-old boy and penetrated truly and conscientiously into his mind and spirit.

"[16] When she followed this in 1975 with a biography of the painter Mary Cassatt, however, the Times' art critic, John Russell wrote that, "The fact that Miss Hale comes of a family of painters and has published a number of novels must be said to have given her delusions of competence both as to the nature of art and as to the motivation of complex and altogether exceptional human beings.

Hale argued that "if Virginia really wanted to further the arts, it could do so easily, moreover cheaply, by purchasing an abandoned motel and staffing it for writers to write in—feeding them and seeing that they were uninterrupted.

[10] After publishing The Prodigal Women, Hale was plagued by a series of physical ailments and bouts of anxiety severe enough to result in 1938 and again in 1943 in what was called a "nervous breakdown."

Always intensely self-critical, Hale worried that she had squandered a promising career and sold-out artistically by writing to make money.

She was fortunate in 1943 to find a psychoanalyst, Beatrice Hinkle, who helped her begin to solve what Hale called "this problem of who to be.