As many of you know, one of my hobbies is to read books that were once popular but have now fallen into obscurity, trying to understand the past through what excited people at the time.

Ramona, a book that has appeared in more than 300 editions since it was first published, was made into a movie four

First published in 1884, and first read in 1885 by women in my family, there has always been a copy available to me. I've read this book many, many times, and it still hits my heart.

Helen Hunt Jackson was one of the very first to point a big shaming finger at the White Man when it came to all indig

Ramona was a hero for her time, and there are some ways in which she could perhaps be a hero for ours. The protagonist and title character of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona made quite an impression on the readership of late-19th-century American society – even if the author’s hopes that the

This wasn't at all what I expected! I'd always had a vague sense that Ramona was ridiculously rosy picture of "romantic Olde California" full of caballeros and things, but as it turns out it was intended as a propaganda novel about the rotten treatment of Californian Indians and Mexican landholders

Helen Hunt Jackson wrote Ramona to draw people's attention to the injustice being done to the Indians living in California. She was friends with Harriet Beecher Stowe and hoped that her story would have the same impact on the nation that Uncle Tom's Cabin had in the 1850's.

Boy was she wrong. Dead w

Go with me on this.

It’s the year 2060. We have our flying cars, vat-grown replacement organs and Kim Kardashian’s Skanky Grannies reality TV – but you know what we don’t have? Anybody that remembers The Great Gatsby. Not the book, not the movies – nothing. That seems like an almost impossibility, ri