(FORTUNE Magazine) – SARAH BINGHAM, known as Sallie, seems an unlikely rebel. At 49, she is gracious and candid, a published novelist and playwright, eldest daughter in the patrician Bingham dynasty of Louisville, Kentucky. She is also a woman of strong opinions and iron will. Her determination helped precipitate an epic family drama that in 1986 toppled the Binghams' media empire and pushed its flagships -- the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times -- into the waiting arms of Gannett Co. The drama began in 1977, when Sallie returned to Louisville after two decades in the East, primarily in New York, where she moved following graduation (magna cum laude) from Radcliffe. Far from Louisville's genteel Southern traditions, she had pursued a writing career. She also went through two marriages, to publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth, a founder of the New York Review of Books, and Michael Iovenko, an attorney, and raised three children. Though she had no experience in business, her father, Barry Bingham Sr., named her to the boards of the family companies, along with her sister, Eleanor, now 40, another longtime absentee. Barry Sr. had hoped to promote dynastic unity. Instead he put Sallie on a collision course with her brother, Barry Jr., 53, who ran the newspapers. Sallie and Barry Jr. had never been close as children and had grown further apart as adults. Under Barry Jr. the papers continued a tradition of journalistic excellence -- three of their eight Pulitzer prizes came during his tenure. But circulation and advertising revenues slowly declined. Despite her neophyte status, Sallie was determined to have a say in running things. She questioned business and editorial decisions, once writing a letter to the editor to protest a political endorsement. (It was published.) Barry Jr. resented what he saw as second-guessing and lack of support. By 1984 Barry Jr. was fed up and forced Sallie off the board. He had previously forced Eleanor, his mother, and two other women relatives to resign. Sallie responded by trying to sell her 15% interest to the family. She and Barry Jr. dickered over the value of her shares for 18 months. Finally, over his son's vehement objections, Barry Sr. last January decided to sell the empire rather than see it and his family shattered by dissension. Gannett paid $300 million for the papers. The other businesses -- a TV station, two radio stations, and a printing plant -- fetched $100 million. For Sallie the episode was more than sibling animosity. She saw it as a rebellion against a suffocating tradition in which the men run the family business and the women stay discreetly in the background. ''I wanted to control my own life,'' she says. ''My income depended on those dividends. I wanted to know how big the checks would be and when they would be coming in. I wanted the same familiarity with my finances that I had with the other aspects of my life.'' Married for the third time to Tim Peters, a local contractor, Sallie spends most of her time on their 230-acre farm outside Louisville. She is writing an autobiography, which Knopf will publish in mid-1987, and is rebuilding bridges to her family. ''We're all getting back together again,'' she says. ''There was a good deal of misunderstanding about everyone's motives, but I feel quite pleased about my relationship now with my parents and Eleanor.'' What about her brother? ''It's going to take a little longer with Barry Jr.,'' she says. Sallie and her children received about $50 million from the sales, $10 million of which went to endow the Kentucky Foundation for Women, established by Sallie to support women in the arts who use their work to advance women's rights. The foundation recently distributed its first set of grants: $340,000 to 40 women.