Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson, a versatile and prolific writer, was popular with a large and devoted reading public, praised by most contemporary critics, and acclaimed by such key literary figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson. For two decades she wrote verse, essays, travel sketches, editorials, book reviews, short stories, novels, and literature for children. Adverse to publicity and seemingly intent on bewildering her readers, she signed little of her work with her own full name. Sometimes she used pseudonyms, such as Saxe Holm, Marah, and Rip Van Winkle. More often, she signed only H. H. Many of her book reviews were unsigned, and only some have been identified.

Fifty years after Jackson's death, Ruth Odell pointed out in her 1939 biography that Jackson's place in American literature was due, not to her poems, as predicted by her contemporaries, but to A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona...