--- title: "Dawn Tripp’s Jackie, A Woman We Never Knew: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Between Love and Power" description: Dawn Tripp’s Jackie explores power, privacy and the poetic interior life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, revealing the truth beyond the headlines author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2025-06-15T12:36:53.000Z updated: 2026-03-31T11:22:58.120Z canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/dawn-tripp-s-jackie-a-woman-we-never-knew-jacqueline-kennedy-onassis-between-love-and-power image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/author-dawn-tripp.jpeg categories: Inspiration content_type: Book Review region: Massachusetts publication: Rich Woman Magazine about: - type: Person name: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis --- In the quiet halls of the JFK Library Archives, Dawn Tripp sat surrounded by boxes of letters, transcripts and personal papers, searching not for the famous moments that defined Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the public mind, but for something far more elusive – the private language of a woman who had spent her life carefully curating what the world could see. For ten years, Tripp sifted through these intimate documents, driven by a poet’s instinct for the spaces between words, the silences that speak as loudly as any speech. But after a decade, we have [*Jackie*](https://amzn.to/43JAbLJ)– Tripp’s new novel that allows us to take a deep reflection on power, privacy and the relentless curiosity that drove one of the most scrutinised women of the 20th century. Following her acclaimed 2016 novel *Georgia* about artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Tripp has established herself as a writer uniquely equipped to excavate [the interior lives of women we think we know](https://richwoman.co/article/literary-fiction-brings-new-depth-to-true-crime-genre). ## Beyond the Headlines Tripp’s approach to Jackie Kennedy differs radically from the countless biographies and tell-all accounts that have preceded it. Where others have dissected the public moments – the pink suit, the funeral, the marriages – Tripp sought something deeper. ‘Books that are considered nonfiction take more liberties than I do in *Jackie*,’ she explains. ‘It’s not revising history, it’s offering a new window in.’ That window opened through an unexpected source: Caroline Kennedy’s introduction to [her mother’s collected poems](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/170006.The_Best_Loved_Poems_of_Jacqueline_Kennedy_Onassis), which Tripp describes as ‘a revelation’. In that introduction, Caroline painted a portrait of her mother organised around different aspects of her character – a woman defined not by her public role but by her intellectual passions, her love of language and her fierce independence. ‘At the end of the introduction, Caroline talks about how her mother and her father came together around their passion for books,’ Tripp recalls. ‘In every interview of Caroline that I read, the portrait that came through from Caroline’s words and from Jackie’s own words were very aligned. But those were not the same construct that we all know.’ ## The Poet’s Process Tripp’s background as a poet fundamentally shaped her decade-long research process. Poetry, she says, is ‘that room of my own that I keep… Poetry is my first impulse and my first love.’ This poetic sensibility allowed her to approach Jackie’s story not as a chronological retelling but as an exploration of emotional truth through carefully chosen details. The novelist spent countless hours with Jackie’s own words, studying letters, interviews and personal documents with the patience of someone accustomed to mining meaning from fragmented language. ‘The fragmented dimension of poetry is often deeply true to love and loss and time,’ Tripp notes, a philosophy that runs through her approach to historical fiction. Her method involved what she calls a ‘distillation: working through a river of sludge to get to the grain of what she was… what gave her integrity and her life meaning’. The process required exceptional restraint – reading widely but writing sparingly, always asking, ‘What mattered to her? What did she fight for? What does she grieve? Who was she?’ ### Surprising Discoveries What came through from this careful excavation was a Jackie Kennedy far removed from the poised First Lady of popular memory. ‘When I realised how brilliant she was, that’s what I fell in love with,’ Tripp explains. The woman who surfaced from the archives was driven by ‘relentless curiosity’ – someone who approached travel as an opportunity to learn languages so she could communicate with people in their own tongues, who [built a serious career as a book editor](https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/a10334726/jackie-kennedy-publishing-career/) in her later years, working with over 100 titles. Perhaps most surprising was Jackie’s athleticism. ‘We know she was an equestrian… what we are not expecting is her athletic prowess,’ Tripp discovered. The novelist was particularly struck by footage of Jackie waterskiing while holding her young daughter – a moment that revealed not just physical strength but an unexpected composure. ‘That told me so much about her character,’ Tripp reflects. These discoveries painted a picture of someone who ‘loved her passion for nature, for the sea, her passion for solitude, her fierce independence’. The Jackie who appears in Tripp’s novel is someone who understood that true freedom often required strategic privacy, who wielded her public image as carefully as any politician while protecting the spaces where she could simply be curious, athletic, literary. ## Women, Power and Freedom Tripp describes both *Jackie* and *Georgia* as ‘explorations of a woman’s relationship to power… novels of desire and freedom and the quest for an [independent life](https://richwoman.co/article/why-the-art-of-self-therapy-speaks-to-women-tired-of-shortcuts-real-stories-real-healing)‘. This thematic consistency reflects her fascination with how exceptional women navigate the currents of fame, expectation and their own ambitions. The parallels between Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackie Kennedy might not be immediately obvious, but Tripp sees deep connections. Both women ‘figured out how to navigate and manage and harness the current of power to live lives of their own’. Both became icons while fighting to maintain some essential privacy. Both were defined as much by what they refused to reveal as by what they chose to share. Critics praised [Tripp’s *Georgia* for its lyrical exploration](https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/11280/georgia) of the artist’s psyche and complex relationships, particularly with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Readers, especially women, found compelling the novel’s insight into how a female artist navigated a male-dominated world while protecting her creative integrity. ## The Magic of Stories Tripp’s work arrives at a moment when readers are hungry for complex portrayals of historical women – stories that resist both hagiography and reduction. Her novels offer something rarer: the acknowledgement that public figures contain multitudes, that the women history remembers as icons were also simply women trying to [live authentically within extraordinary constraints](https://richwoman.co/article/meghan-markle-s-as-ever-was-it-worth-the-pain-of-controversy). This summer, [Tripp will share her work](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/243391/jackie-by-dawn-tripp/) at book festivals around the country, including the 2025 Nantucket Book Festival, where she’s excited to participate in what she calls ‘the magic of book festivals’. She believes deeply in the festival’s mission to ‘build community one story at a time’ – a philosophy that undergirds her entire approach to writing. ‘I believe in the magic of reading and stories,’ she says, and that belief is evident in every carefully chosen detail of her decade-long pursuit of Jackie Kennedy’s interior life. The result is not the Jackie you think you know, but rather an invitation to meet the woman who lived vividly behind the carefully maintained public image – someone who shaped her own fate against history’s tide while never losing her fundamental curiosity about the world around her. In an age of instant analysis and social media scrutiny, [Tripp’s patient, poetic approach to understanding public figures](https://richwoman.co/article/the-courage-to-live-the-dream-hollywood-stuntwoman-diane-peterson-inspiring-women-to-overcome-fear-and-follow-dreams) feels both radical and necessary. Her *Jackie* reminds us that the most interesting stories often exist in the spaces between what history records and what the human heart experiences – territory that only a poet would have the patience and skill to explore.