Her father was a partner in the Manchester merchants of Fazy & Co. Sara's eldest sister was Mary Hennell and her youngest was Caroline Bray.
[1] The sisters are considered to be the basis for the fictional Meyrick family in George Eliot's 1876 novel Daniel Deronda.
After his sister's marriage to Bray, a thoroughgoing sceptic, her brother Charles Hennell reviewed the evidences for Christian beliefs to parry his brother-in-law's argument.
[4] In 1851, she and her mother left Hackney in London, and moved to Ivy Cottage in Coventry in the Midlands.
[4] Having met David Strauss when travelling in Germany with the Brabants in 1844, Sara declined to translate Strauss' Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) and instead agreed to revise the work of her sister-in-law Rufa, and then of Evans, to whom the task of translation was passed in 1844.