Helen Hunt Jackson (May 11, 1828 – March 12, 1893) was an American author and journalist, most notably for her work as a pioneer feminist and abolitionist. She was born in Brunswick, Maine and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1847. She was forced to return home without her diploma because of illness and never returned to college. She began her career as a short story writer and writer of poetry and prose for the "North American Review"
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She married Charles Jackson in 1849, but he died two years later. In 1866 she remarried, this time to George D. Prentice, editor of the New York Evening World.
In 1868 they moved to the new city of New York. In 1874 she published "Aunt Mary's Stories", a series of stories about life as a woman in the early nineteenth century. Her first novel, Ramona (1884), was met with mixed reviews from critics who were not accustomed to a woman writing a story with a strong female character.
Like many of her novels she drew on her personal experiences, though she had never been involved with Indian people or cultures before writing Ramona. When Ramona was first published it received anger from some Californian Indians who claimed that Native American culture had been defaced by Ramona's depiction of life on the California missions as oppressive and cruel. In response to their complaints about Ramona Helen wrote a letter titled "In Defense of Ramona" which appeared in the Boston-based magazine "Ladies' Home Journal".
In it she argued that Ramona had been written purely from a historical perspective and that Aunt Mary's stories were more historically accurate than the old texts detailing the missions, which were often based on hearsay rather than firsthand knowledge. Jackson also defended herself against criticism that she had not tried to convey the true meaning of the missionary period, by pointing out that she had written about people who were long dead and could not defend themselves or explain their actions. Her second novel, The Rose of Santa Clara (1888), depicted Spanish-Mexican culture through the eyes of young Isabel Santos.
Her third novel, The Doctor's Wife (1894), is one also about an Indian woman married to an Anglo man who has converted to Christianity after meeting an Anglo missionary named Dr. Bradshaw at Fort Laramie in Wyoming. It is no longer considered one of her best works by critics who do not accept it as part of Jackson's canon because it does not fit