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On October 24, 1788, in Newport, New Hampshire, Captain Gordon Buell, a veteran of the American Revolution, and his wife, Martha, greeted the arrival of a daughter named Sarah. She was a brilliant child, an avid reader, and grew into an accomplished autodidact. By 1813, she was a schoolteacher, married to a local lawyer named David Hale.

Nine years later, Hale died, and Sarah was left to provide for their five children. She did so by becoming a published poet and author, her career bankrolled partly by her late husband’s Masonic lodge. One of her novels drew the attention of an Episcopal minister in Boston, and Sarah was hired as the editor of his Ladies Magazine and Literary Gazette , a job she held throughout her life as it changed titles and owners. In 1829, she publi

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