According to Wikipedia: "Helen Maria Hunt Jackson (October 18, 1830 – August 12, 1885) was an American writer best known as the author of Ramona, a novel about the ill treatment of Native Americans in southern California... She was a classmate of the poet Emily Dickinson, also from Amherst. The two carried on a correspondence for all of their lives, but few of their letters have survived... In 1852, Helen Fiske married United States Army Captain Edward Bissell Hunt, who died in a military accident in 1863. Her son Murray Hunt died in 1854 of a brain disease; her other son, Rennie Hunt, died of diphtheria in 1865. She began writing after these deaths. She traveled a great deal. In the winter of 1873-1874 she was in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in search of a cure for tuberculosis. There she met William Sharpless Jackson, a wealthy banker and railroad executive. They married in 1875.[3] Over the next two years, she published three novels in the anonymous No Name Series, Mercy Philbrick's Choice and Hetty's Strange History, before turning her attention to novels about Native Americans. "