Sarah Joanna Dennis, Mrs. L. Dow Balliett

She was born Sarah Joanna Dennis on 1 March 1847. Like several of her generation's American occult authors, she wrote and published under her married name, appearing on her own title pages as Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, the form under which she is still catalogued in library records today. Comparatively little of her early or personal life survives in accessible sources; she is known almost entirely through her published work and her role in the numerology movement of the early twentieth century United States.

She died on 11 December 1929 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was buried in nearby Pleasantville. By the time of her death she had produced several books and built a small but durable following, and the system she set out had already begun to pass, through her own students, into the form that numerology still largely takes in English language practice. She wrote at a moment when American numerology was still assembling itself out of scattered nineteenth century number mysticism, Theosophical numerical symbolism and popular self improvement literature, and her books did more than most to give the field a settled vocabulary and a repeatable method rather than a loose set of correspondences. She lectured as well as wrote, building a following large enough to sustain her work as a full time occupation for the last decades of her life, at a time when few women supported themselves through public esoteric teaching in the United States.