Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life by Kate Phillips (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 4 6 3 more forceful on this point. “I have learned from my own embarrassing experience ,” he writes in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), in a sentence ecocritics might wish to keep in mind, “how easy it is to concoct remarkably persuasive Darwinian explanations that evaporate on closer inspection. The truly danger­ ous aspect of Darwin’s idea is its seductiveness” (521). Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. By Kate Phillips. Berkeley. University of California Press, 2003. 380 pages, $34-95. Reviewed by Wendy Witherspoon University of Southern California, Los Angeles One can imagine the elation biographer Kate Phillips felt, after working for eight years on her biography of Helen Hunt Jackson, to receive a call from Jackson’s great-grandnephew telling her he had just discovered a suitcase full ofJackson’s long-missing letters. This discovery was especially fortuitous since she had ordered that most of her letters and papers be destroyed after her death. In this, the first Jackson biography since Ruth Odell’s in 1939, Phillips has studied more than thirteen hundred Jackson letters and revisited Jackson’s many published writings, from poetry to travel writing to fiction. The result is a compelling biography that extends our understanding of Jackson’s life and (re)defines the terms of Jackson’s significance as a “regionalist” writer. Best known for Ramona (1884), the first novel about southern California ever published, Jackson was one of the nation’s most successful writers in the late nineteenth century. But two issues (in addition to shifting popular tastes that meant audiences thought Ramona overly sentimental) have haunted Jackson’s critical status in recent years. First, scholars have argued that her campaign for Native American rights in works such as A Century of Dishonor (1881) as well as Ramona might actually have had a negative effect because the years following Ramona and Jackson’s death ushered in the disastrous Dawes Severalty Act (1887), which broke up tribal ownership of Native American land and encouraged encroachment by white settlers. At the very least, as Phillips points out, Ramona created apathy regarding dispossession of Native American lands because of the sense of nostalgia that pervades the novel. And second, much of Jackson’s work is haunted by ambiguous attitudes not only about nineteenth-century racial hierarchies but also about American imperialism in the West. In Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life, Phillips provides important bio­ graphical information that helps contextualize the ambiguities in Jackson’s work. Despite a long-standing commitment against the “spread of civiliza­ tion,” for example, some of Jackson’s travel essays about southern California in the early 1880s actually seem to promote white American settlement of the region. Phillips provides context for such ambiguity by showing the way Jackson’s letters reveal her perceptions that the region “lacked culture” and 4 6 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 that American settlers were irrevocably entrenched in the area. In her travel essays on southern California, as Phillips notes, “she therefore made it her ambition not to protest the American presence in California per se, but to advocate for a gentler, more sensitive sort of presence” (241). While Phillips judiciously limits her discussion of Jackson’s advocacy for Native American rights—perhaps because so much has been written recently about this aspect of Jackson’s career—her biography still holds much in store for those interested in western American literature. Jackson’s influence can still be seen in both the literature and landscape of southern California: not only, as Phillips notes, did Ramona feature “the first figures in the long line of disappointed, deracinated heroes who populate ... later Southern California fiction,” but Jackson’s beloved novel also inspired architectural movements and the renaming of whole towns after the main character (3). And Phillips, herself a talented novelist (White Rabbit [1996]), tells the fascinating story of the woman whose work left such an indelible mark. Modoc Sundance. By Sean Belanger. New York: U SA Books, 2002. 217...