Sarah Morewood (1823–1863) was a poet and literary figure who developed a close relationship in the 1850s with her nearest neighbor in the Berkshires, the novelist Herman Melville. In 1983 Professor Michael Rogin of the University of California, Berkeley, was the first to suggest that Morewood was a model for the character of Isabel in Melville's dark novel of romance and ambition Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). Thirty-three years later biographer Michael Shelden argued in Melville in Love (2016) that Morewood influenced Melville's work not only in Pierre, but also in Moby-Dick (1851), and that for much of the 1850s the two were lovers. Early years Born in New Jersey in 1823, Sarah Anne Huyler was the seventh of nine children in an American-Dutch family of "modest means." In 1845 she married John Rowland Morewood, a wealthy English-born businessman in New York, with whom she had a son in 1847. A troubled pregnancy left her in poor health, which she sought to improve by spending summers in the Berkshires. There, as Hershel Parker was the first to show, Sarah Morewood engaged in a flirtatious summer romance with Alexander Gardiner—President John Tyler's brother-in-law—and she soon came to be regarded in some local circles as "a married woman who permitted herself reckless friendships with men other than her husband." At the same time, she also acquired a modest reputation in the Berkshires as a promising poet. In September 1850 one of her poems was set to music and sung by a choir at the dedication of the Pittsfield Cemetery, an occasion which also featured Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. reading one of his poems. Relationship with Herman Melville In August 1850 Herman Melville vacationed in the Berkshires, intending to stay only a short time. He was then thirty-one, and owed much of his literary fame to the success of his first book, Typee (1846). After getting to know Sarah Morewood and Nathaniel Hawthorne during August, he abruptly decided to move his family to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, uprooting his young wife (Elizabeth Shaw Melville) from their home in Manhattan. In his haste to move, Melville "acted impulsively, and extravagantly, even recklessly," observed biographer Hershel Parker. In September 1850 Mrs. Morewood and her husband had bought the 250 acre farm in Pittsfield owned by Melville's uncle (the site of Melville's childhood fondness for the area), and in the same month Melville borrowed more money than he