Sarah Josepha Hale, nineteenth-century American woman of letters and one of that country's earliest female professional journalists, wrote or edited about fifty books (fiction, household advice, works for children, poetry, and biography) as well as winning fame as the editor of Godey's Lady's Book and the encyclopaedic biographical dictionary Woman's Record. She offers a complicated, controversial, and in some respects feminist version of middle-class female sensibility as crucial to the republic.