Emily Hahn (1905-1997) was a remarkable woman who was very ahead of her time. Known as “Mickey” to her friends, Hahn drove across the United States in the 1920s dressed as a boy; hiked across central Africa on her own; worked for the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo during the Great Depression; was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai in the 1930s; became an opium addict; had an affair and an illegitimate child with the head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong just before the outbreak of the Second World War; and organized underground relief work in occupied Hong Kong before moving back to the U.S. in the 1940s.

Hahn also wrote hundreds of articles and short stories for the New Yorker from 1925 to 1995, working with four of the great New Yorker editors – from Harold Ross to Tina Brown. She had 52 books published, including biography, humour, and fiction. (Her travel memoir China to Me sold more than 24,000 copies in the first two months after its 1945 release.)

Ken Cuthbertson, a Kingston, Ontario journalist and historian whose Inside: The Biography of John Gunther was nominated for a Governor General’s Award, creates an intimate portrait of Hahn in Nobody Said Not to Go. (The title is Hahn’s response when asked why she did what she did: “Nobody said not to go.”)

Hahn’s close friends included beggars and kings, missionaries and prostitutes, heads of state, poets, spies, and soldiers, and British writer Rebecca West, who once said to Hahn, “Like you, I’d have a far higher reputation if I were male.” Hahn was a 1990s woman born in the 1920s: sexually liberated, she drank, smoked, and spoke her mind – all activities deemed unsuitable for a woman in the early 20th century.

Cuthbertson’s book is well researched, with much material drawn from Hahn’s letters to friends and family, and descriptive scene-setting context such as war-torn Hong Kong and the dangers of Africa in the late 1920s. What makes Nobody Said Not to Go eminently real and readable – marred only by Cuthbertson’s occasional reliance on clichés– is that Cuthbertson doesn’t glorify his subject or gloss over the times Hahn was broke, drunk, or depressed.