An accomplished editor and author whose career spanned more than five decades, Sarah Josepha Hale was a successful and influential figure in the antebellum literary world. For more than four decades she edited Godey's Lady's Book, the most popular magazine in the United States before the Civil War, and she used Godey's Lady's Book both to promote her views on contemporary women's issues and to influence popular literary standards. Hale was a prolific author as well-- publishing novels, collections of short fiction, poetry, books on cooking and housekeeping, edited collections, and an ambitious nine-hundred-page reference work about women in history. Two plays and countless poems, short stories, and essays appeared in the pages of her magazines and in many of the most popular gift books and anthologies of the period.

Born on 24 October 1788 to Gordon and Martha (Whittlesey) Buell, Sarah Josepha Buell grew up on a farm in...