She contributed to The New York Times, the Nation, The Atlantic, and other periodicals, and also published several books, including biographies of Hans Christian Andersen and Emanuel Swedenborg.

She lived parts of her life in the United States and Ireland, and all her writings were in English.

In 1918, she married the journal's founder, Francis Hackett, an Irish writer and literary critic.

[8] In 1943 she and her husband lived in Newton, Connecticut, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the academic year 1943–1944.

The goal of the biography was "to interpret the kind of man he was, with some reference to his scientific achievements but with special emphasis on his ideas concerning human survival after death, linked to a comparison of modern ideas on the same subject, and to be written from a nontheological point of view".