[1] A year or two later, a special interest in the classics led to private study of Greek by firelight, as a result of which her vision was so impaired that she was obliged to wear glasses, and had very imperfect sight the remainder of her life.

[3] Sometimes using the pen name, "Aunt Libbie",[4] and always a lover of children, Hoyt, in early life, contributed many children's poems to newspapers and magazines, especially to The Atlantic, under the editorship of Horace Scudder, who paid her several times what he did any others for similar contributions, and who considered some of her poems so inimitable as to be capable of illustration, at that time, by but one artist in the U.S.[2] She published several books for children,[3] including Little George and his Hatchet : a lesson of Truth (1858).

[5] When a young woman, she taught mental philosophy, French and mathematics in the Worthington (Ohio), Female Seminary.

[3] Uniting with her philosophic tendencies the utmost practicality in domestic affairs, and not withstanding life-long physical weakness and further impairment of her sight by cataracts, Hoyt was yet able, with incidental assistance for her friends, to gain wide familiarity with ancient and modern literature, and wrote a number of papers, either published or read before institutions of learning, among the more important of which were: "The Horticultural Embellishment of School House Grounds", "On the Revolutionary Movement among Women", "A New Theory of the Immaculate Conception", "An Attempt to Find the Absolute by a Philosophic Method", "The Place of the Brownings in English Literature", "An Exposition of Schiller's Ballad, 'The Diver'", "Education", "Consciousness", "The Limits of Intellectual Cognition", and "Psychology in the Public Schools".

[2] Hoyt wrote between 100-200 short poems of an historical, romantic, political, sociological, and philosophical character, some of which were published in the Springfield Republican, The Peacemaker, and elsewhere.

[2] She died from the effects of a stroke of paralysis, at the home of her son, Kepler Hoyt, Washington, D.C., on September 22, 1912.