She started investigating and publicizing government misconduct, circulating petitions, raising money, and writing letters to The New York Times on behalf of the Ponca.Ī fiery and prolific writer, Jackson engaged in heated exchanges with federal officials over the injustices committed against the Ponca and other American Indian tribes.
Upset about the mistreatment of Native Americans by government agents, Jackson became an activist on their behalf.
Standing Bear described the forcible removal of the Ponca from their Nebraska reservation and transfer to the Quapaw Reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where they suffered from disease, harsh climate, and poor supplies. In 1879, Jackson's interests turned to Native Americans after she heard a lecture in Boston by Chief Standing Bear, of the Ponca Tribe. She also encouraged a contribution from Emily Dickinson to A Masque of Poets as part of the same series. Over the next two years, she published three novels in the anonymous No Name Series, including Mercy Philbrick's Choice and Hetty's Strange History. He included five of them in his Parnassus: An Anthology of Poetry (1880). She published her early work anonymously, usually under the name "H.H." Ralph Waldo Emerson admired her poetry and used several of her poems in his public readings. They married in 1875 and she took the name Jackson, under which she was best known for her later writings. While in Colorado Springs, Hunt met William Sharpless Jackson, a wealthy banker and railroad executive. (See Tuberculosis treatment in Colorado Springs). In the winter of 1873–1874 she was in Colorado Springs, Colorado at the resort of Seven Falls, seeking rest in hopes of a cure for tuberculosis, which was often fatal before the invention of antibiotics. In 1872, she visited California for the first time. The years 1868–1870 were spent in Europe, in travel and literary work. It was the commencement of a long and fruitful connection with that magazine, with The Century later, and with The Nation and Independent. Her first successful poem, "Coronation", appeared in The Atlantic three years later.
Her real literary career began when she removed herself to Newport, in the winter of 1866. Up to this time, her life had been absorbed in domestic and social duties. Most of Hunt's early elegiac verse grew out of this heavy experience of loss and sorrow. Her second son, Warren "Rennie" Horsford Hunt (1855–1865) died at age 9 of diphtheria in 1865 at his aunt's home in West Roxbury. Her husband was killed in October, 1863, in an accident that occurred while he was experimenting with one of his own marine inventions. They had two sons, one of whom, Murray Hunt (1853–1854), died as an infant in 1854 of a brain disease. She was a classmate of Emily Dickinson, also from Amherst the two corresponded for the rest of their lives, but few of their letters have survived.Ĭareer Marriage, family, and early writing career Fiske attended Ipswich Female Seminary and the Abbott Institute, a boarding school in New York City run by Reverend John Stevens Cabot Abbott. He had provided financially for Fiske's education and arranged for an uncle to care for her. The girls' mother died from consumption/tuberculosis in 1844, when Fiske was fourteen. Banfield, a federal government official who served as Solicitor of the United States Treasury. She had two brothers, Humphrey Washburn Fiske (?–1833) and David Vinal Fiske (1829–1829), both of whom died soon after birth, and a sister Anne. Her father was a minister, author, and professor of Latin, Greek, and philosophy at Amherst College. Helen Maria Fiske was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of Nathan Welby Fiske and Deborah Waterman Vinal Fiske. 2.1 Marriage, family, and early writing career.