[1] to graduate in June 1906, with a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Texas, Austin, Phi Beta Kappa,[2] She served for seven years as a Baptist missionary and Y.W.C.A.
[1] In 1928 Swann joined the library at McGill University, in Montréal, then home of what would become the Gest Oriental Collection.
[5] In 1931, Swann both received her doctorate from Columbia University and became curator of the Gest Collection, a position she continued to hold until her retirement in 1948.
[10] Sinologist E. Bruce Brooks calls it a "lavishly annotated" translation, and notes "perhaps no deep psychological analysis is necessary to understand why someone who had gone through the Depression with a salary sometimes amounting to zero would be interested in economics.
"[7] The historian Edward A. Kracke wrote that the work was "not so much an analytical study of the period she treats, the western Han dynasty, as a critical presentation of the principal source materials relating to the subject, in the form of annotated translations with more detailed studies of certain special phases.