In 1945 she married Boxer who, during the time he was interned by the Japanese, had been reported by American news media to have been beheaded; their reunion—whose love story had been reported faithfully in Hahn's published letters—made headlines throughout the United States. They settled in Dorset, England at "Conygar", the estate Boxer had inherited, and in 1948 had a second daughter, Amanda Boxer (now a stage and television actress in London).
Finding family life too constraining, however, in 1950 Hahn took an apartment in New York City, and visited her husband and children from time to time in England. She continued to write articles for
The New Yorker, as well as biographies of Aphra Behn, James Brooke, Fanny Burney, Chiang Kai-Shek, D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan. According to biographer Ken Cuthbertson, while her books were favorably reviewed, "her versatility, which enabled her to write authoritatively on almost any subject, befuddled her publishers who seemed at a loss as to how to promote or market an Emily Hahn book. She did not fit into any of the usual categories" because she "moved effortlessly ... from genre to genre."
In 1978 she published
Look Who's Talking, which dealt with the controversial subject of animal-human communication (her personal favorite among her non-fiction books); she wrote her last book
Eve and the Apes in 1988 when she was in her eighties.
Hahn reportedly went into her office at
The New Yorker daily, until just a few months before she died on February 18, 1997 at the age of 92, following complications from surgery for a shattered femur.
"Chances are, your grandmother didn't smoke cigars and let you hold wild role-playing parties in her apartment", said her granddaughter Alfia Vecchio Wallace in her affectionate eulogy of Hahn. "Chances are that she didn't teach you Swahili obscenities. Chances are that when she took you to the zoo, she didn't start whooping passionately at the top her lungs as you passed the gibbon cage. Sadly for you ... your grandmother was not Emily Hahn."
In 1998, Canadian author Ken Cuthbertson published the biography
Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn. "Nobody said not to go" was one of her characteristic phrases.
In 2005
Xiang Meili (the name given to Hahn by Sinmay) was published in China. It looks back at the life and loves of Hahn in the Shanghai of the 1930s.
- Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction...A Beginner's Handbook (1930)
- Beginner's Luck (1931)
- Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degree North (1933)
- With Naked Foot (1934)
- Affair (1935)
- Steps of the Sun (1940)
- The Soong Sisters (1941, 1970)
- Mr. Pan (1942)
- China to Me: A Partial Autobiography (1944, 1975, 1988)
- Hong Kong Holiday (1946)
- China: A to Z (1946)
- The Picture Story of China (1946)
- Raffles of Singapore (1946)
- Miss Jill (1947) also as House in Shanghai (1958)
- England to Me (1949)
- A Degree of Prudery: A Biography of Fanny Burney (1950)
- Purple Passage: A Novel About a Lady Both Famous and Fantastic (1950) (published in the UK as Aphra Behn (1951))
- Francie (1951)
- Love Conquers Nothing: A Glandular History of Civilization (1952)
- Francie Again (1953)
- Mary, Queen of Scots (1953)
- James Brooke of Sarawak: A Biography of Sir James Brooke (1953)
- Meet the British (with Charles Roetter and Harford Thomas) (1953)
- The First Book of India (1955)
- Chiang Kai-shek: An Unauthorized Biography (1955)
- Francie Comes Home (1956)
- Spousery (1956)
- Diamond: The Spectacular Story of the Earth's Greatest Treasure and Man's Greatest Greed (1956)
- Leonardo da Vinci (1956)
- Kissing Cousins (1958)
- The Tiger House Party: The Last Days of the Maharajas (1959)
- Aboab: First Rabbi of the Americas (1959)
- Around the World With Nellie Bly (1959)
- June Finds a Way (1960)
- China Only Yesterday, 1850-1950: A Century of Change (1963)
- Indo (1963)
- Africa to Me (1964)
- Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemianism in America (1967)
- Animal Gardens (1967)
- The Cooking of China (1968)
- Recipes: Chinese Cooking (1968)
- Times and Places (1970, reissued as No Hurry to Get Home 2000)
- Breath of God: A Book About Angels, Demons, Familiars, Elementals and Spirits (1971)
- Fractured Emerald: Ireland (1971)
- On the Side of the Apes: A New look at the Primates, the Men Who Study Them and What They Have Learned (1971)
- Once Upon A Pedestal (1974)
- Lorenzo: D. H. Lawrence and the Women Who Loved Him (1975)
- Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (1977)
- Look Who's Talking! New Discoveries in Animal Communications (1978)
- Love of Gold (1980)
- The Islands: America's Imperial Adventures in the Philippines (1981)
- Eve and the Apes (1988)