Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as "vacuous" themes, this archival study examines women's compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms. By focusing particularly on two related hybrid forms--the letter composition and the sermon composition--this article demonstrates the discursive nature of women's intellectual work as it circulated within and beyond seminary walls, in both written and oral forms, serving as localized evidence of a gendered antebellum epistolary culture. (Contains 27 notes.)