Sarah P. McLean Greene (1856–1935)

Sarah "Sally" McLean, later Greene, was born in in Simsbury, Connecticut, one of five children of Dudley Bestor McLean and his wife Mary Payne. Her brother George Payne McLean became a governor of Connecticut and U.S. Senator. Sally was educated at private schools and then attended Mount Holyoke Seminary (precursor to Mount Holyoke College). In 1874, after two years at Holyoke, she went to teach in the Cedarville, Massachusetts, school system for a year. On returning home, she turned her experiences as a teacher into a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1881 as Cape Cod Folks. It received good reviews, although some of the people whose names she had used for her characters sued her for libel and won a settlement.

The novel was adapted into a 1924 silent film under the title Her Man. Sally followed up with another novel with a New England locale, Towhead: The Story of a Girl (1883). The following year, she published a collection of her magazine stories as Some Other Folks. These and other writings about New England remain her best-known work. In 1887 she married Franklin Lynde Greene, with whom she would have two children who died in infancy, and moved with him to the western United States. This was the setting for her next pair of books: Lastchance Junction (1889) and Leon Pontifex (1890). After her husband died in 1890, Sally returned to New England. She retired from writing in 1913, having published 14 books during her career.