Helen Hunt Books

Helen Hunt Jackson was a pioneer in the movement by "palefaces of conscience" for more humane treatment of the American "Indian". She (through her writings) was responsible for elimination of the worst abuses by the US Army and the Indian Bureau. This book (the capstone of her research) outlines the findings she made the original wording of treaties with various tribes and how the whites, not the Native Americans, had been the ones to abrogate the treaties.

Anyone interested in justice for Native peoples needs to read this book. I found it hard to obtain through the library systems in the Philadelphia, PA area (and we have some of the best available). I highly recommend this for any citizen who considers themself informed.

In this book, Helen Hunt Jackson is an excellent and fascinating biography of an independent 19th century lady whose claims to literary fame rests on her remarkable circle of friends and a single romantic novel that aroused the public sympathy towards the plight of the American Indian.Helen Hunt Jackson was the author of "Ramona",a tragic novel of social injustice.After more than a century(and more than 350 successive printings)Ramona is still in print and has been compared to "Uncle Toms Cabin" that is one of the best selling books in publishing history.The saga of Ms. Jackson's life has all the scope and diversity of good romantic fiction and is peopled with an incredible cast of characters including her life long friend,Emily Dickinson;her literary advisor,Ralph Waldo Emerson and her California mountain guide,John Muir.This is a great book!!

...you just can't get over,once you've read her work you want to know everything there is to know about her!

The concept of the imago (Latin for match) in romantic relationship is based on the theory that we fall in love with those who most closely match our primary caregivers' negative and positive traits. OR we are selecting partners who are the polar opposites of those patterns we experienced in childhood. If this is correct it is no wonder that some relationships reflect a kind of "same role, different actor" scenario. The person you are dating may seem completley different from the others but it winds up playing out the same script and ending. This is not an indictment that something is wrong with you as a person. Rather, it hints that there may be an outdated imago match unconsciously driving these events to you. By changing and updating your imago match to suit an emotionally healthy partnership in the future, your life stories can change for the better. When you change the blueprint you have a different ending. Isn't it time for a happy ending after enough tragedy for a lifetime?

For more on the Imago Relationship Theory: http://imagorelationships.org/public.htm

Being a member of The Juaneno Band of Mission Indians in San Juan Capistrano, Ca. This book has given me a great bit of understanding into how our people were treated and how this lady dedicated the last years of her life to helping the mission indians in California.I'm a new fan of Mrs.Jackson's writings.

This book can be read without its companion. What makes this workbook special is that it is meant to be read one page a time for daily reflection. The book has exercies for you, and asks you to make journal entries. The workbook has the potential to be a guide to help you learn about yourself, and what you will need from a relationship.
If you are a fan of these authors, I would highly recomment this workbook. I have found the IMAGO theory a valueable tool in learning about myself, and what I bring into a relationship. This book sits on my nightstand and has become a valuable part of my daily readings. I highly recommend the this workbook as the book did not delve into individual topics as this book does.

This is a wonderful book filled to the brim with history of the theatre. It discusses each person and peorid in dept, while including a multitude of plays from each. Perfect for the Student new to the theatre or the professional looking to sit back and refresh.

Helen Hunt Jackson still has a fan club, apparently, presumably mainly amongst fans of the authentic Old West and people interested in Native American affairs. At least, you can Google your way to places where you can buy Helen Hunt Jackson teeshirts and such. Other than that, Jackson seems mainly remembered today for her friendship with Emily Dickinson, being by birth a New Englander, born just around the corner from Emily D's Amherst Mass home, and in the same year.

Having originally taken to the Western climate for her health, Jackson came late in life to discover, and advocate for, in her writings, the plight of the Native Americans. She was, however, no mere noissome agitator for social justice, but a remarkably gifted, well-tempered writer, seen in top form in many of the short works of which this slim book is comprised, as charmingly authentic in its Western descriptive narration and feel as a collection of Frederic Remington paintings; a lost American treasure, in effect, pregnant with all the delights of rediscovery.

I think this is essential reading for reflection for ALL couples whether they have been married one day or eighty years

The book was received in a timely manner and the condition was as promised.

Have just finished reading "Getting the Love you Want" by the same author. He has the best way of presenting & teaching that I've ever experienced with a writer on this subject matter. And, wonderful exercises are included at the end to enable readers to practice application of what they've just read. Very helpful.

According to these PhD authors, it is easier to give love than to receive it. It goes back to our childhoods when a parent failed to nurture and rejected the person who depended on him for her very life. When a mother is absent, and a mean uncaring father ignores the daughter, she ends up with a complex which clearly says "Nobody can love me, so why try."

When we get grown, even married to a noncaring, sick man, it is impossible to get the love we want and need. Sometimes, you just have to look elsewhere. And that's not good for the children. Oh yes, you can have children without loving the father of those children. Sometimes, it is forced on you; sometimes it is taken from you when an abusive husband forces the wife to have an abortion, because He does not want to spend money to raise another one.

In this book, there is a guide to help one break the shackles of self-hate and -rejection, and to accept love from others. So often, what they are offering is not love, so you must weigh the issues and try to come to a logical (not emotional) conclusion. Your very life depends on it.

First, you must accept what is offered, but not indiscriminately. Be sure it is love and not lust. All women are "used" on occasion, but if possible you must not give in. The authors of this guide to help you to decipher true love from false promises look to be a couple. There is a science to any relationship; learning to accept love from the person you do love will make you whole again. We all have the potential to love freely and devotedly.

However, you can love more than one man at a time!

I am familiar with Hendrix's Imago workshop format, attended one years ago in NY with my significant other. It was one of the most challenging and difficult weekend experiences of my life! The relationship did not last, having NOTHING to do with the workshop (it was hanging by threads before).
Years later, a good friend who is a therapist, recommended Receiving Love. I felt quite resistant, based on my limited experience, however, since I know many couples who have benefitted from Harville's work, I decided my resistance must mean there is something for me to learn.
I am learning and opening my heart to issues I thought were healed. Maybe some stuff is never complete... at least for me, I sometimes need more fine tuning, to rehash areas of my childhood that may be lingering quietly in the dark recesses.
The book is a valuable guide (even for those not in relationship right now, like me) to clarify why things are not working in the "sample" couples. In fact, I think the sampling covers just about any potential issue, except perhaps extreme abuse.
The exercises are very challenging, I've only done the easy ones so far. The material is deeply thought-provoking, solidly researched and presented with compassion and intellect.
I appreciate the Hendrixes work, style and dedication to helping people discover themselves. This material offers the endless opportunity to heal yourself and help your mate heal their childhood wounds. Isn't that what we all want?
Give yourself and your partner a huge gift... read this book, then do the exercises. And talk and keep talking...
Pie Dumas - Author & Life Coach

A very interesting and insightful book. Here are some representative excerpts.

God can be more easily found in human love than in the human mind - from the Brothers Karamazov

Ongoing interaction with a long-term partner can be an agent of transformation more powerful than any other. We have come to believe that it is the clearest way for transformation to occur.

Sooner or later in every relationship the initial attraction turns into a power struggle as couples find themselves facing in their spouse the same behavior and attitudes that drove them crazy in their parents. (Or it could be they project issues they had in the past with other people onto their spouse).

It turns out that loving your partner is the best way to facilitate your own personal and spiritual growth.

The impulse to step away from positive input is an indication that you have problems receiving love.

The most important commitment we (the authors) made were to end negativity and move toward amplifying the positive, even though we said many times we didn't know how to do that.

Separate Knowing = what is real and true exists independently of who is doing the observing.

Connected Knowing = Let me suspend my critical judgments for a minute and see if I can enter your world and try to feel the truth of what you are saying.

We are formed from every important relationship we have ever had.

No one comes to a relationship empty handed. There are all kinds of information, prejudice, wishful thinking, and expectations interjected between people before they really get to know each other.

Self-rejection and self-hatred are directly related to the problems people have in receiving love; i.e., "I'm not good enough".

What do butterflies and good relationships have in common? Both are colorful, but they also go thru 4 stages: For good relationships they are: attraction, romance, power struggle, and mature love (the full blown butterfly). For humans, volition is required for their transformation. Romantic partners have to become conscious (not act unconsciously), set goals, exercise patience and make good choices if their relationship is to progress to the next level.

We assign our partners characteristics we don't allow ourselves to have. We attribute a quality, fault, skill, motive, thought or feeling that originates from us. In a way we project onto them what we don't or won't know about ourselves.
One clue that it's a projection rather than an objective assessment is if it's veracity is asserted repeatedly, with intense emotion.

Being quick to anger or excessively self-absorbed are more often a symptom of unhealed wounds rather than a character defect. When people are mistreated as children, they don't know they have sustained a hit that strongly shapes the way they will connect to friends and other intimates in the future.

Kindness is an appropriate way of life when everyone is carrying the burden of previous psychological injuries.

Self rejection often masquerades as something else. It can be disguised as hypercriticalism of others or dissatisfaction and negativity about life in general. It can also look like perfectionism or shyness or a reluctance to extend oneself by trying new things.

A person who is having trouble receiving love will show it by consistently deflecting the positives and/or absorbing the negatives.

No matter how disconnected we feel, we are still part of the universal, interwoven tapestry of life. We cannot live in isolation, and we cannot heal alone.

We know that the reason people can't receive love is because they can't accept positive input for traits, talents, and qualities they've disowned, and they can't receive gifts their parents didn't approve of their having. In other words, self-rejection and self-hatred block their ability to take in what would be healing.

You cannot even heal your disconnection by loving other people or by loving God. You may compensate for your self-hatred by loving others, but you do not heal the breach within yourself. You must start loving in your partner those traits, habits, attitudes, and behaviors that give you the most trouble, in fact the very things he or she does that drives you crazy. It could be anything.

What you don't like or have rejected in yourself, you tend to project onto others, with the most on-target projections aimed at your partner. In order to relate to the parts of yourself that are missing, you project them onto your partner and relate to them in that form. You can experience the disapproval and dislike you have for yourself by disapproving and disliking those same things in your mate. This sounds far-fetched only because most projections are created in the unconscious. You don't know you're doing it.

The key is to understand, accept and `love' in your partner the things you hate, because then, in effect, you will be loving them in yourself. This works because the brain doesn't make a distinction between loving yourself and loving the Other. So when you approach the faults or your partner; i.e. your own projections of your partner's faults, with understanding, tolerance and acceptance, you get a double bonus. You experience understanding, tolerance, and acceptance for yourself as well as for your partner. Through repeated acts of loving acceptance, you gather to yourself all your neglected, abused, and frightening parts. Gradually you are restored to wholeness through the hard work of practicing acceptance.

What you need to do:

1. Make a list of the traits you would eliminate or exaggerate in you could in your partner.

2. Examine your list and know that these same traits are in some way connected to you. They are a mirror of the things you have rejected in yourself.

What you make up about your partner (or anyone else) and invest with energy is also true of you. The more you're trying to protect yourself from yourself, the more your projections will seem to you to bear no resemblance to yourself, and the more you will tell yourself that you are not like that in any way. Only when you stop projecting will you know that you've started to become whole.

Fear can make people deaf. It can limit people to talking, without truly communicating.

The inability to listen is always related to how deeply the person is wounded, and therefore, self-absorbed and closed-in.

Published in 1916 Jackson's classic romance--in every sense of the word--recreates an already bygone era. After the 1834 Secularization of the 21 missions in the chain founded by Father Serra, the California of the grandees slowly, inevitably began to fade into historical memory. Three groups were drastically affected by the disintegration of this social system--admittedly not free of innate injustice. Ruin fell upon the devout Franciscan fathers, the Hispanic hidalgos who had received vast estates from the King, and the Native Americans who first respected the land--ever at the bottom of the social chain.

Depicted as the underlying moral evil of all three groups are the
Yankees--Americans in general, whose greed and violence destroyed innocent lives, trampled decades of royal justice and raped the landscape of Alta California with wanton violence and callous indifference. Dispersed among these recriminations and regrets the author weaves a grimly fascinating tapestry of love, psychological brutality, outraged or warped honor and overbearing pride.

Senora Moreno rules her household with an iron fist and a cold heart, except where it concerns her only, somewhat naïve son, Felipe, 20. A master at manipulation this dowager wields absolute power to her vast household and retainers but also behind the scenes, deferring only to aged Father Salvierderra, for whom she has had a chapel built.
Keeping selfish secrets about her dead sister's half-breed daughter (who considers a marriage between a white man and an squaw valid?), she hoards both the jewels and the love int ended for the girl. Obeying only the letter of her promise to her sister, she never intended to honor the spirit of motherhood, thus condemning Ramona to be raised without affection.

At 19 Ramona is lovely, sweet, gentle and genteel (thanks to her convent training) but sheltered in a simple country lifestyle, where she is kept in ignorance of the reality of the present world and her own, mysterious past. This tenuous status quo changes when the annual sheep shearing occurs, the year that 21-year-old Alessandro, the educated son of a chief, leads his band of Indians to the hacienda. Their hidden love smolders until it erupts in a passionate embrace, which is unfortunately witnessed and misinterpreted by the shocked Senora.

Her outraged reaction and fierce determination to punish the
culprits sets in motion a chain of events which result in both the lovers
fleeing the rancho. There follow years of persecution of this doomed pair, as they seek to live peacefully--in harmony with nature and man. Jackson includes heavy themes in this story: racial prejudice, the power of Catholicism, the tension between mother and son, and the regenerating force of love. Partly a novel of social protest, RAMONA--despite its semi-tragic denouement, remains a classic tale of old California, whose pathos and passion reach out to modern readers.

Ramona is a historical romantic fiction that was written in the late nineteenth to help publicize the cause of Indian Rights. The author, herself an activist, tells the story of the injustices that were done to the Spaniards, Mexicans and Indians by the early American explorers who came to California. Ramona, who is part-Indian. becomes the heroine in a tale of love and hate. The book is one of the most famous stories ever written about early California, and there have been annual Ramona-festivals in many towns over the years. There is also a town named Ramona in southern California. Most of the characters are very well drawn, but the main character of Ramona is lacking. This does not spoil the impact of the book. As a lover of early western history in America, this book is the best I have ever read about the transition of the old world into the new. Reading it for the second time, I have enjoyed it even more.

It has been a long time since I first read this book, but the subject matter will be around for a long time to come. Bewitching love story for which at least one beautiful song has been written, "Ramona" and possibly "Vaya Con Dios". It is a love story, one whose emotion most of us will recognize; another time, another place, from our own Spring Time; woven skillfully into cultural differences, that somehow begets bigotry, born of all the little differences that make each of us unique, but also make us strange and unacceptable to others who cannot accept differences from what they have always known.

The descriptions of that far removed landscape and time are marvelous. The Old early Missions, the sheep, the priests who visit the valley in the traditional way on foot, traveling on ancient footpaths to bring religion to the people (and keep them religious), all are magical in their simplicity as the author brings forth their tale. She is also one of the first to dare write of things unsavory to the average conscience. She took conditions "as they were" and exposed them "for what they were" in the treatment of people displaced.

It's a setting deep within the Old Spanish Mission Country of Southern California, among the sheep ranches, and steeped in Spanish Culture, strict traditions, and unforgiving religion. Times were hard, values were strict and anyone not fitting snugly into a pre-conceived notion of a pre-conceived group was hard-pressed to find a life to live in peace anywhere. It is in this life where Ramona grows up, a child of a misalliance between the former lover of the Senora Moreno's own sister and an Indian woman - that's a twist in the story to be discovered while reading it. The Senora, for a variety of reasons you will understand as you read, agrees to take the child Ramona in to raise, although she never accepts her, because she is not blood family. The description of Ramona is captivating, long black hair of the Indian girl, dark blue eyes of the Scottish father - truly she is beautiful, but it is also apparent that her beauty goes deeper than the skin; she is beautiful of spirit as well as of the flesh.

Alessandro, an Indian lad, comes to work on the ranch early in the spring to help with the annual sheep shearing. Ramona quickly sees in him something she has never seen before - someone who will accept her for whom she is, without reservation, coupled with a gentle mind and character much like her own. She falls in love with him, adding another layer of "difference" to her half-breed status.

Felipe, the beloved son of the venerable, strong and proud Matriarch, Senora Moreno, who rules not only the ranch but her son with an iron hand, falls in love with Ramona himself but knows he can never take her for his own, for many reasons. Those "reasons" finally dissolve during the tragic ending of the story and what remains of the life of Ramona blends again into the home she left as a young woman - as she tried to make a new life with a stranger she has loved deeply. As she is delivered back to a life of security, she is strangely serene - but never again will she feel wild, young excitement once experienced with Allesandro, the Indian. I offer one of the last lines of the epilogue - as she finally stands "quietly in Filepe's arms":

"...how unlike was she to that Ramona who flung herself on Alessandro's breast, crying 'take me with you! I would rather die than have you leave me!'....."

Ramona is well deserving of it's place in Classic Literature - a love and strife story extraordinaire.

Helen Hunt Jackson's two major books, CENTURY OF DISHONOR and RAMONA were on a reading list of mine when I was a graduate student back in the Upper Paleolith. I didn't like either book, but am forced to concede their value.

RAMONA reminded me of trying to eat ten gallons of ice cream. It was too sweet, too melodramatic and I was lucky to avoid death by cloying suffocation from reading it.

It is, however, a great example of late 19th century romance. People didn't have e-mail, text messaging, computers, TV or radio. Instead, they read! A lot of them read RAMONA and apparently enjoyed it a lot more than many of today's readers.

It is dated, but that is its true value, in my opinion. Jackson doesn't step out of her skin, or her age, when she writes. Some of the dated, annoying stereotypes which roll off her pen illustrate the perceptions of the age in which she lived. For better or worse, that's their value.

If you're interested in American Literature, Intellectual History, or regional literature related to California, RAMONA may be of interest to you. I have a copy and enjoy it in small doses as befits an aging Philistine.

I heard about the book while hiking at Seven Falls near Colorado Springs. HHJ was suppose to have gone to the overlook there to write, including parts of Ramona. This intrigued me and so I checked it out. I don't read much non-fiction, so I enjoyed the idea of a history based novel. It was enough of a love story for me to earn points with female friends, but enough of an adventure to keep me interested. One part of the book that I found distracting was the attempt at phonetic spelling of the Tennessee drawl of a few characters. I had the hardest time reading that, which perhaps is an excellent way of HHJ to capture the difficulty of listening to it.