Sarah Pogson Smith's drama, poetry, and prose explored issues in theology, history, and anthropology. Her books frequently address cross-cultural encounters between Christians and adherents of other religions, particularly Islam. As she moved up and down the eastern seaboard, she wrote almost exclusively to benefit her favorite charities. While she followed the career of her stepson, the influential reformer and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, during the last half of her life, she took little interest in abolition and woman suffrage, the causes for which he became well known.

Facts about the first fifty years of Sarah Pogson's life are scant. She was born on 17 September 1774 in Essex, England, to John Pogson and his second wife, Ann Wood Pogson. John Pogson, who had inherited several plantations in the West Indies, was renting Woodside House in Essex at the time that Sarah Pogson and most of her siblings were born. Shortly after...