Brief biography on helen hunt jackson chapter

Library of Congres Read more. Helen Hunt Jackson. Helen Hunt Jackson was an American author of fiction whose most famous novel, Ramona, dramatized the plight of California's Indians. Later she signed her writings "H. In an attempt to regain her health, Mrs. Hunt visited Colorado in In October, , she married William S. Jackson of Colorado Springs and made Colorado her home.

A lecture in Boston in about the plight of the Ponca Indians excited the interest of Mrs. Although she continued her other writing, the American Indian became her primary concern. She wrote A Century of Dishonor in and sent a copy of it to each member of Congress. Their report was published in Discussing much new material, Kate Phillips makes extensive use of Jackson's unpublished private correspondence.

She takes us from Jackson's early years in rural New England to her later pioneer days in Colorado and to her adventerous travels in Europe and Southern California.

Brief biography on helen hunt jackson chapter

The book also gives the first in-depth discussions of Jackson's writing in every genre, her beliefs about race and religion, and the significance of her chronic illnesses. Phillips also discusses Jackson's intimate relationships—with her two husbands, her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the famed actress Charlotte Cushman, and the poet Emily Dickinson.

Phillips concludes with a re-evaluation of Ramona, discussing the novel as the earliest example of the California dystopian tradition in its portrayal of a state on the road to selfdestruction, a tradition carried further by writers like Nathanael West and Joan Didion. In this gripping biography, Phillips offers fascinating glimpses of how social context both shaped and inspired Jackson's thinking, highlighting the inextricable presence of gender, race, and class in American literary history and culture and opening a new window onto the nineteenth century.

Helen Hunt Jackson is best remembered for the novel "Ramona," a romantic tale of old California that was the inspiration for the so-called Ramona Pageant, the closest thing to a passion play that the popular culture of California has yet produced. Nearly every summer since , amid the cactus and chaparral near Hemet, the saga of Ramona, half-Indian and half-Scottish, and her full-blooded Indian lover, Alessandro, has been staged for audiences that now exceed 2 million.

Kate Phillips, a novelist "White Rabbit" as well as a literary scholar, seeks to put Jackson in her rightful place on the literary landscape -- and a lofty place it is. Her critical biography of Jackson rescues the writer from deepening shadows of a fastfading reputation and throws a bright light on her life and work. What she reveals about Jackson is surprising and fascinating: Jackson was an early advocate of the rights of Native Americans and a visionary who clearly saw California as an imperiled paradise.

Phillips shows herself to be an enterprising and indefatigable researcher. She sought out and examined 55 holdings of Jackson's letters, including some that were not available to earlier scholars. She also discovered that Jackson had laid obstacles for her biographers: "It is best to have no record anywhere of anything we don't wish to share with strangers after we are dead," Jackson once wrote to her husband, instructing him to burn the more intimate passages of her letters, which she carefully confined to separate pages to make it easier for him to carry out his task.

Only two months after the death of her second son, Jackson published her first work in the New York Post, a poem titled "The Key to the Casket. Fatefully, her wanderlust carried her all the way to California, where she saw the terrain that she would soon populate with memorable characters of her own invention. Their baby boy, Murray, was born a year later--but he died at the age of eleven months, from a brain disease.

A year after that heartbreak, their second son Warren "Rennie" was born. The Civil War broke out, and two years into the war, Helen's husband Edward was killed during an experiment. Two years later, in , Helen's beloved son Rennie died of diphtheria, at the age of 9. Helen was overwhelmed with grief. But it was not long before that grief was directed into writing.

In the aftermath of the Civil War and its massive losses, no doubt many could share in her pain. In her haunting poem "The Prince is Dead," she writes these words:. The Prince is dead. As Helen began to travel to Europe and throughout the United States, she began to write on a variety of topics.