An author and editor, Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo (1819-1848) was one of fifteen children born into an affluent family in Shirley, Massachusetts. In girlhood, she excelled at academics, spending a period of time at Westford Academy. Her interests included geography, the natural sciences, botany and poetry. At seventeen, she joined the Universalist Church and contributed financially to her family by publishing pieces in the Universalist periodical Ladies’ Repository and The Rose of Sharon, an annual compilation of writings by Universalists. She became an editor of both while also publishing poems, letters, and two didactic novels with themes relating to nature, love and religion.