Sarah Pratt McLean Greene

Sarah Pratt McLean Greene (July 3, 1856 – December 28, 1935) was an American regionalist writer whose novels of local life were set in New England and the western United States. She published her earlier books as Sally Pratt McLean and later books as Sarah P. McLean Greene.

Early life and education

Sarah "Sally" McLean was born in 1856 in Simsbury, Connecticut, the fourth of five children of Dudley Bestor McLean and Mary (Payne) McLean. Her brother George P. McLean became a governor of Connecticut and U.S. senator.

McLean was educated at private schools and then at Mount Holyoke Seminary (the precursor to Mount Holyoke College). In 1874, after two years at the seminary, she went to teach in the Cedarville, Massachusetts, school system for a year.

New England novels

On returning home, Greene turned her experiences as a teacher into a quasi-autobiographical novel that was published in 1881 as Cape Cod Folks. It received good reviews; critics found it fresh and lively, an admirable piece of genre writing—although one newspaper observed that it was not so much a novel as "a triumph of character sketching, with novelistic developments."

Although she fictionalized Cedarville into "Wallencamp," she did not change the names of all of her characters who were based on real people, and some of those named in the book were unhappy with how they were depicted. In particular, they felt they were made to appear rustic, odd, and backwards, in part through Greene's use of dialect. Although she apologized, they sued her for libel and won a settlement. In later editions, the names of all characters were changed, in some cases multiple times.