She remained a unique combination of rebel and conformist throughout her life.
There were four children in the Fiske family, two boys who died in infancy and Helen and Anne. After the Fiske parents died when Helen was a teenager, she was raised by an aunt. After schooling in Charlestown, Pittsfield, and Falmouth, Helen Fiske's rather random education continued at the well-known Ipswich Female Academy, where Henry Home's 1762 volume Elements of Criticism seemed to make quite an impression on her, because she later quoted it frequently. In New York City, she attended the school of John and Jacob Abbott (the latter wrote the then-popular Rollo books). Emily Dickinson had been an early neighbor and schoolmate in Amherst, and the two women were lifelong friends and admirers of each other's poetry.
In 1852 Helen Fiske married Lieutenant Edward Bisell Hunt, eventually a major in an army corps of engineers, and lived the transitory life of a military household. Her husband was a man of no small scientific accomplishment and through him Helen Hunt met many important men in the military and in science. The Hunts had two sons; one died in infancy and the other not long after her husband was killed in 1863 while experimenting with an invention he called a "sea miner."
Before her husband's death, Helen Hunt had led an active life, but as Thomas Wentworth Higginson pointed out in his Contemporaries (1899), she gave no particular indication of wanting to become a writer.
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