Helen Hunt Jackson Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Carol E. Schmudde

Critical Essay by Carol E. Schmudde

SOURCE: “Sincerity, Secrecy, and Lies: Helen Hunt Jackson's No Name Novels,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 51-66.

In the following essay, Schmudde contends that although Jackson was an accomplished essayist, poet and short story writer, she did not realize the full potential and power of her writing abilities until she began publishing her work under her own name. The essay also contains an overview of Jackson's early novels, concluding with a brief analysis of Jackson's eventual involvement with the Native American cause.

Until the last six years of her life, Helen Hunt Jackson's career as a nineteenth-century American women writer was in so many ways conventional that most contemporary critics conclude, as Cheryl Walker does in The Nightingale's Burden, that “for Jackson the culturally determined literary sensibility she inherited was definitive.”¹ She turned to writing only after the deaths of her first husband...
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