Sara Jane Lippincott (pseudonym Grace Greenwood) (née Clarke; September 23, 1823 – April 20, 1904) was an American writer, poet, correspondent, lecturer, and newspaper founder.

The volumes for older readers are two series of collected prose writings, Greenwood Leaves (1849, 1851); Poems (1850); Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1852); A Forest Tragedy (1856); A Record of Five Years (1867); New Life in New Lands (1873); Victoria, Queen of England.

[2] She was a prominent member of the literary society of New York along with Anne Lynch Botta, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley, Richard Henry Stoddard, Andrew Carnegie, Mary Mapes Dodge, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Butler, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Delia Bacon, and Bayard Taylor, among others.

[4] There was nothing remarkable about her education, but she did study Italian, algebra, calculus, English and French history, though literature was her delight, and it became evident that writing was her vocation.

[6] She removed with her family in 1842[a] to New Brighton, Pennsylvania, where her father practiced as a physician,[1] and which she considered to be her home time for the rest of her life.

In 1844, she drew national attention, at age 21, with a poem published in the New York Mirror, then under the editorship of George Pope Morris and Nathaniel Parker Willis.

In the February 14, 1846 issue of the Home Journal, The Wife's Appeal, a poem by Sara J. Clarke, is published just above Tit-for-Tat, a story by Grace Greenwood.

In winter, she was in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York City, writing for Whittier, or for Willis and Morris, or for Neal's Gazette, or for Godey.

[11] She joined the National Era, a weekly abolitionist newspaper, and copyedited the serialized original version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as writing columns, travel letters, and articles.

After her husband fled the United States in 1876 to escape prosecution for misappropriation of government funds, Lippincott continued her writing and resumed lecturing in order to support herself and her daughter,[12] who trained for a career on the stage.

For the ten years preceding this, she had done most work and won most distinction in journalism, principally in articles contributed from Washington, to the New York Tribune and the New York Times, on national and political questions, which she has handled in a patriotic way, showing an unusual knowledge of political history and of the construction, principles and tactics of the two opposing parties of the United States and time.

[12] Her obituary was on the front page of the New York Times, "proving her importance as a literary figure in the nineteenth century".

[12] Lippincott's style was something quite new, characterized as "brilliant, picturesque, piquante, every line sparkled; the words seemed to bound rather than flow from her pen".

Her writings displayed a charm of style which was evident in the best American works of the mid 19th-century but was so seldom seen thirty years later.

The first lasted from the days of the boarding-school till marriage, —from the first merry chit-chat and Greenwood Leaves, to the full-rounded, mellow prime, as displayed in the letters from Europe.

With the Civil War commenced the third period, years "vexed with the drums and tramplings," the struggles of middle life.