Letters from a Cat

By Helen Hunt Jackson

Popular children's book, first published in 1879.With 17 illustrations. According to Wikipedia: "Helen Maria Hunt Jackson (October 18, 1830 – August 12, 1885) was an American writer who became an activist to improve United States government treatment of Native Americans. She wrote newspaper articles and directly to government officials. In 1882, she published A Century of Dishonor, about the adverse effects of government actions, and sent a copy to each member of the US Congress. She gained the widest public with her novel Ramona, dramatizing the ill treatment by the United States (US) government of Native Americans in Southern California. It was generally received more as a romance than political novel. In addition to remaining in print, it was adapted for a play and three films, released from 1925 to 1936."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seltzer Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781455398010

Helen Hunt Jackson

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) was an American poet and activist. Born Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was raised in a unitarian family alongside a sister, Anne. By seventeen years of age, she had lost both of her parents and was taken in by an uncle. Educated at Ipswich Female Seminar and the Abbott Institute, she was a classmate and friend of Emily Dickinson. At 22, she married Captain Edward Bissell Hunt, with whom she had two sons. Following the deaths of her children and husband, Hunt Jackson dedicated herself to poetry and moved to Newport in 1866. “Coronation” appeared in The Atlantic in 1869, launching Hunt Jackson’s career and helping her find publication in The Century, The Nation, and Independent. Following several years in Europe, she visited California and developed a fascination with the American West. After contracting tuberculosis, she stayed at Seven Falls, a treatment center in Colorado Springs, where she met her second husband William Sharpless Jackson. Praised early on for her elegiac verses by such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hunt Jackson turned her attention to the plight of Native Americans in 1879 following a lecture in Boston by Ponca chief Standing Bear. She began to lobby government officials by mail and in person, launching and publishing her own investigations of systemic abuse in the New York Independent, Century Magazine, and the Daily Tribune. In 1881, she published A Century of Dishonor, a history of seven tribes who faced oppression, displacement, and genocide under American expansion. She sent her book to every member of Congress and continued to work as an activist and writer until her death from stomach cancer. Ramona (1884), a political novel, was described upon publication in the North American Review as “unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman.”

Book preview

LETTERS FROM A CAT. PUBLISHED BY HER MISTRESS FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL CATS AND THE AMUSEMENT OF LITTLE CHILDREN. BY H. H.

Published by Seltzer Books

established in 1974, now offering over 14,000 books

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Letters from a Cat by Helen Hunt Jackson

The Hunter Cats of Connorloa by Helen Hunt Jackson

WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY ADDIE LEDYARD.

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1879.

Copyright, 1879, By Roberts Brothers. 

INTRODUCTION.

I. My Dear Helen:

II. My Dear Helen:

III. My Dear Helen:

IV. My Dear Helen:

V. My Dear Helen:

VI. My Dear Helen:

VII. My Dear Helen:

INTRODUCTION.

Dear Children:

I do not feel wholly sure that my Pussy wrote these letters herself. They always came inside the letters written to me by my mamma, or other friends, and I never caught Pussy writing at any time when I was at home; but the printing was pretty bad, and they were signed by Pussy's name; and my mamma always looked very mysterious when I asked about them, as if there were some very great secret about it all; so that until I grew to be a big girl, I never doubted but that Pussy printed them all alone by herself, after dark.

They were written when I was a very little girl, and was away from home with my father on a journey. We made this journey in our own carriage, and it was one of the pleasantest things that ever happened to me. My clothes and my father's were packed in a little leather valise which was hung by straps underneath the carriage, and went swinging, swinging, back and forth, as the wheels went round. My father and I used to walk up all the steep hills, because old Charley, our horse, was not very strong; and I kept my eyes on that