Helen Hunt Jackson, one of the most versatile and widely admired popular authors of the latter part of the nineteenth century, did not begin writing until she was thirty-five years old, shortly after her second son, Rennie, died of diphtheria. Her first published poems, "The Key of the Casket" and "It Is Not All of Life to Live," were sentimental verses on that death that appeared in The New York Evening Post in 1865. The pseudonym she used, Marah, was the first of several aliases, including H. H., Rip Van Winkle, Saxe Holm, and No Name. Such was Jackson's progress as a writer that within three years of her first publication her literary mentor and editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, considered her sufficiently established to discuss her work in his article "The Female Poets of America." Ralph Waldo Emerson thought highly enough of her poetry to comment in the preface...