A Separate Star:
Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson

Edited by Michelle Burnham

Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-59714-074-4, $21.95
320 pages (6 x 9)

A California Legacy Book

The complex legacy of a pioneer woman writer and advocate for Native American justice.

Best known for the books A Century of Dishonor and Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson was revered for her depictions of social issues facing the West at the end of the nineteenth century. At a time when women writers struggled to gain recognition, her work spanned two decades and ranged from anonymous pieces of travel writing to poetry, romantic fiction, children’s literature, and parenting advice.

While her nonfiction book A Century of Dishonor brought attention to the desperate conditions of Native Americans, it was her novel Ramona that captured the public’s imagination. In much the same way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin exposed the cruelty of slavery, the love story in Ramona depicted the plight of Southern California’s landless Indians and changed popular perceptions about the laws and policies of the day.

Praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson as “the greatest woman poet” and described by her literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, as “the most brilliant, impetuous, and thoroughly individual woman of her time,” Helen Hunt Jackson, her body of work, and her fierce independence remain as impressive now as they were in her own day.

About the Editor:

Michelle Burnham teaches American and Native American literature at Santa Clara University. She is the author most recently of Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System (2007) and she also edited a recent reprint edition of the anonymous 1767 novel The Female American (2001).