Nearly ninety years after Jackson's death, John R. and Elizabeth S. Byers indicated, in the introduction to their comprehensive critical bibliography of secondary comment on her, that she is remembered for one novel,
Ramona, and one cause, that of the Indian. Evelyn I. Banning, in her 1973 biography, echoes this view. However, Jackson's cat stories, her book about "Colorado life"
Nelly's Silver Mine (1878), her many contributions to magazines for children and young people, and her much-anthologized and often-memorized poetry have helped earn her a secure place among nineteenth-century authors of juvenile literature.
Helen Hunt Jackson was born into an academic environment in Amherst, Massachusetts, on 15 October 1830. She was brought up in a stern, restraining atmosphere of learning, religion, and decorum. Her father, Nathan Welby Fiske, was a serious young clergyman and a professor of Latin and Greek at Amherst College, a stronghold of orthodox Calvinism, and her mother, Deborah Vinal Fiske, was a pious, educated Bostonian. At age nine, Helen Fiske catalogued the books in her personal library, including The Pastor's Child, The child's Book of Repentance, Scripture Animals, The Reformation, and other solemn titles. As a child, Helen Fiske was impulsive, often recalcitrant, with a strong will of her own, not "tractable and easily managed," as her mother once wrote.
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