"In Praise of 'Ramona'": Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson's Indian Novel

In the winter of 1884-1885, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) sent her friend Emily Dickinson a copy of her recently published novel Ramona and received from Dickinson a brief letter of appreciation. Although much of Dickinson's reading matter has been examined by scholars, Ramona has received little of that attention, which, in Jackson's case, has focused instead on her Saxe Holm stories and her novel Mercy Philbrick's Choice, all believed at one time to have a close connection with Dickinson or her life story. Those works now mostly gather dust on library shelves. Ramona, in contrast, is the single work by Jackson to remain continuously in print since its first publication and to retain the interest of literary critics, the respect of historians, and the admiration of general readers.

We have no evidence of Dickinson's response to the Saxe Holm stories or Mercy Philbrick (or even that she read them), but we have clear evidence of her interest in Ramona from her letter to Jackson of March 1885: "Pity me," she laments . . . I have finished Ramona. Would that like Shakespere, it were just published!" (L976). For the modern reader, her typically cryptic statement provokes as many questions as it answers. For Jackson it may have been as puzzling as Dickinson's "Dooms of Balm" (L444, 444a) had been earlier. ¹ Further evidence of Dickinson's interest appears in her sister Lavinia's statement to a literary critic in 1895 that Emily "considered Mrs. Jackson's intellect very rare . . . [and] often spoke in praise of 'Ramona.'" ² As the finest work by one of Dickinson's warmest friends, and as an influential document in an important reform movement of Dickinson's time, Ramona and its history deserve our attention. A clearer understanding of Jackson's novel, its background, and its critical and popular reception may help to illuminate Dickinson's reaction.

Ramona was one of two major works that resulted from Jackson's crusade for reform in America's relations with the Indian tribes. Never before had she become involved in any of the reform movements that swept America in the nineteenth century. Her conversion to the Indian cause (the word "conversion" in its religious sense seems entirely appropriate) came when she was forty-nine and, consciously or unconsciously, seeking a new direction for her life. ³ In October 1879 she heard a lecture in Boston by two Ponca Indians, whose tribe had been expelled from their ancestral lands in Nebraska. The Indians' cause won numerous supporters throughout the East, none more outspoken and effective than Jackson. In the words of a modern historian, Jackson at this point "determined to be a crusading journalist instead of a lady writer," "to break out of that genteel belletristic strait-jacket for which she had been fitted" (Turner 718).

During the six remaining years of her life, Jackson wrote hundreds of letters to newspaper and magazine editors, members of Congress, leading literary figures, and friends, urging them to right our wrongs to the Indians. In 1881 she published A Century of Dishonor, a study of historical documents that revealed the consistently shameful treatment of the Indian tribes by the United States government. It was the first book on which Jackson allowed her name to appear. ⁴ She hoped the book would cause a powerful shift in public opinion that would force Congress to "cut short our nation's record of cruelties and perjuries!" (31). ⁵ In this hope Jackson was to be disappointed. The book did not enjoy wide sales, and it would be six years before Congress would make the first stumbling attempt at reform of American Indian policy. ⁶

But as a result of her work in the Indian cause, Jackson won appointment as a special commissioner to examine the condition of the Mission Indians of Southern California -- the remnants of the thousands who had...