Biographical Note

Helen Hunt Jackson was born Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts on October 14, 1830. Her parents, Nathan Welby and Deborah (Vinal) Fiske, were orthodox Calvinists and Helen was raised as such. Her father was a minister who also taught Latin and Greek at Amherst College. Both of her parents were writers, and used writing to express their beliefs of predestination and Christianity. In contrast to her good friend Emily Dickinson, as a child Helen was known for her large personality and grand imagination.

In 1841, Jackson began what would become a lifetime of traveling, by going to live with family friends in Hadley, Massachusetts. Jackson’s mother suffered from tuberculosis, or consumption as it was then called. In 1843 Jackson went to live at a boarding school in Pittsfield. Deborah Fiske’s health did not improve and she died from tuberculosis in 1844. Her father was also not healthy, and died in 1846 of dysentery. At the age of 16, Helen was an orphan. Helen and her sister Annie went to live with Julius A. Palmer and his family. Mr. Palmer became the girl’s guardian, while their grandfather supported them financially.

In 1851, Helen went to live with Mr. Palmer’s brother, Reverend Ray Palmer, in Albany, New York. It was in Albany that Helen met and eventually married Edward Hunt, a civil engineer and lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers. They were married on October 28, 1852, a few weeks after Helen’s twenty-second birthday. In 1853, they had a son Murray. Helen was about to suffer more losses, as Murray died at age one of brain tumors. Helen and Edward conceived another child and Helen spent her pregnancy in fear. She gave birth to a second son in 1855, Warren Horsford, nicknamed Rennie. From 1857-1862, Edward was stationed in Key West, and didn’t see his family except in summers. In 1863, Edward was killed when testing a device he invented that could shoot torpedoes from submarines. In 1865, Helen and Rennie went to visit her sister Ann in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where Rennie contracted diphtheria and died three days later. Though Helen locked herself away, she also began to write. Her first publication, titled “The Key of the Casket” (1865), was a poem for Rennie.

In the 1870’s Helen herself became sick and was instructed by a doctor to move to Colorado Springs in the hope that the climate would better agree with her. It was in Colorado Springs that Helen met William Sharpless Jackson, who would become her husband in 1875. It wasn’t long before Helen began to travel the Western United States. While traveling, Helen witnessed the poor treatment of Native Americans and took up an interest in expressing this unjust behavior to the rest of the country.

Helen’s most popular publication, Ramona, dealt with these injustices, and was based on a scene that Helen had witnessed involving a white man killing a Native American man. It was published in 1884. Helen wrote the book while dealing with her illness, which would later be revealed as cancer. She felt that was her mission to write this book, although she knew it would be her last. In 1885, Helen died in a boarding house in California.