Helen Hunt Jackson, born Helen Maria Fiske on 15 October 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and dead on 12 August 1885 in San Francisco, California, lived a life shaped by literary ambition, devastating bereavement, restless travel, and an increasingly fierce commitment to justice for Native peoples. She achieved wide fame in her own century as a poet, essayist, travel writer, novelist, and public intellectual. Today sh…
“I shall be found with ‘Indians’ engraved on my brain when I am dead. A fire has been kindled within me, which will never go out.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Wonder
Ada Cambridge, who would become one of colonial Australia's most prolific and quietly subversive literary voices, was born on 21 November 1844 at St Germans, Norfolk, England. She was the second child of Thomasine and Henry Cambridge, a gentleman farmer of comfortable means. The Norfolk countryside, with its flat, expansive skies and ancient, weathered churches, would seep into her imagination and later resurface in…
“But, looking back, and trying to be strictly fair all round, I am not sure that the women of the fifties were so much less sensible (according to their lesser lights) than their descendants of to-day.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
