| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Kate Phillips. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. x, 370. $34.95.
With this definitive and eminently readable biography, Kate Phillips reminds us that despite over two decades of impressive achievement by feminist scholars, work remains to be done to resurrect the reputations of important but still-neglected American women writers.	1
Among the first American women writers to be a self-supporting professional, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) was a literary star in the two decades after the Civil War and remained a famous author for almost five decades after her death, disappearing from the canon as literary studies became increasingly institutionalized in the 1930s and male critics began dismissing her, mistakenly, as a sentimental writer. With the encouragement of the influential Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her intimate friend and literary mentor, she dedicated herself early in her career to poetry and earned the acclaim of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others. A poet of decidedly conventional verse, she nevertheless recognized that Emily Dickinson, her childhood friend (both born in 1830 in Amherst), was "a great poet" (p. 145). She first begged and then badgered Emily to publish.	. . .

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