JACKSON, HELEN MARIA (1831-1885), American poet and novelist, who wrote under the initials "H. H." (Helen Hunt), was born in Amherst (Mass.) Oct. 18,1831, the daughter of Prof. Nathan Welby Fiske. A girl of unusual versatility and vivacity, she was educated at the Ipswich Female Seminary and at a private school in New York. In Oct. 1852 she married Captain (after wards Major) Edward Bissell Hunt (1822-63), of the U.S. corps of engineers. The sudden deaths of her husband and two sons within a period of about ten years caused her at first to feel that her life was ended, and then to turn to writing. In 1870 she pub lished a little volume of meditative Verses, which was praised by Emerson in the preface to his Parnassus (1874). In 1875 she mar ried William S. Jackson, a banker, of Colorado Springs.
Although she became a prolific writer of prose and verse, in cluding juvenile tales, books of travel, household hints and novels, she is remembered primarily for her efforts on behalf of the red men. A Century of Dishonor (1881) was an arraignment of the
treatment of the Indians by the United States, written after care ful research in the Astor library. Later she was appointed special commissioner with Abbot Kinney to investigate the conditions and needs of the Mission Indians in California. Feeling that she had accomplished little, she conceived the idea of setting forth the evils in a novel, Ramona (1884). The injustices she portrayed did, as she intended, "move people's hearts." Nevertheless the book has been admired chiefly because of its romantic picture of the old patriarchal life in California. Mrs. Jackson died in San Francisco Aug. 12, 1885.
See "Helen Jackson (`H. H!)" in T. W. Higginson's Contemporaries (1899) ; G. W. James, Through Ramona's Country (1908) ; and C. C. Davis and W. A. Alderson, The True Story of "Ramona" (1914).