Alice Tisdale Hobart

Alice Tisdale Hobart (January 28, 1882 – March 14, 1967) born Alice Nourse in Lockport, New York, was an American novelist. Her most famous book, Oil for the Lamps of China[1], which was also made into a film, drew heavily on her experiences as the wife of an American oil executive in China amid the turmoil of the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912.

Spinal meningitis in infancy and a fall when she was seventeen left Alice Nourse with frail health and back trouble which caused her to be semi-invalid at periods throughout her life.

She attended the University of Chicago, but never graduated, opting instead to take a job. She first traveled to China in 1908 to visit her sister Mary, who taught at a girls' school in Hangchow, and returned two years later to take up a post at the same establishment. After marrying Earle Tisdale Hobart, a Standard Oil Company executive, in Tientsin in 1914, she traveled to Manchuria and in 1916 published an article on her experiences at the hands of Manchurian bandits in The Atlantic Monthly. It led to a series of pieces entitled Leaves From a Manchurian Diary and formed the basis for her first book, Pioneering Where the World is Old in 1917.

Her life in Changsha formed the backdrop for her second book, By the City of the Long Sand in 1926, while an assault on Nanking by Nationalist soldiers and her escape over the city wall to the safety of the waiting American gunboats was recounted in Within the Walls of Nanking in 1928. This book started as a piece in Harper's Magazine. Her fictional account of her experiences in China, not surprisingly, focused on the role played by Western businessmen, especially those engaged in importing and selling petroleum products.

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