Letters from a Cat: Published by Her Mistress for the Benefit of All Cats and the Amusement of Little Children

By Helen Hunt Jackson

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Letters from a Cat" (Published by Her Mistress for the Benefit of All Cats and the Amusement of Little Children) by Helen Hunt Jackson. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547169567

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

Helen Hunt Jackson

Letters from a Cat

Published by Her Mistress for the Benefit of All Cats and the Amusement of Little Children

EAN 8596547169567

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

INTRODUCTION.

Table of Contents

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 valise all the while I was walking behind the carriage; it seemed to me the most unsafe way to carry a valise, and I wished very much that my best dress had been put in a bundle that I could carry in my lap. This was the only drawback on the pleasure of my journey,--my fear that the valise would fall off when we did not know it, and be left in the road, and then I should not have anything nice to wear when I reached my aunt's house. But the valise went through all safe, and I had the satisfaction of wearing my best dress every afternoon while I stayed; and I was foolish enough to think a great deal of this.

On the fourth day after our arrival came a letter from my mamma, giving me a great many directions how to behave, and enclosing this first letter from Pussy. I carried both letters in my apron pocket all the time. They were the first letters I ever had received, and I was very proud of them. I showed them