Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet: 1612-1672

• Born in England to Thomas Dudley, an important Puritan leader and manager of the country estate of the Puritan Earl of Lincoln
• Because of her access to the Earl’s library and her father’s devotion, she enjoyed a superior education
• Puritans were adamant about women remaining out of the public sphere, but did encourage them to attain literacy and an education as they needed to be able to read and understand the Bible
• At 16, she marries Simon Bradstreet, also a Puritan
• 1630: Sails to Massachusetts Bay Colony on the Arbella along with John Winthrop
• Bradstreet writes that her “heart rose in resistance” to her new living conditions at first, but that “after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted myself to it and joined the church at Boston” (qtd. in Baym 115)
• We know little about her daily life except that it was undoubtedly harsh and difficult
• She had poor health, but still gave birth eight times
• Simon goes on to become secretary of the Massachusetts Bay Company and, eventually, Governor
• “She is the first in a long  line of American poets who took their consolation not from theology but from the ‘wondrous works,’ as she wrote, ‘that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end” (Baym 115)
• In 1650, her brother-in-law takes Bradstreet’s manuscript to London (apparently without her knowledge) and publishes it
• The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
• Book is the first published volume of poems by a New World resident
• It is widely read and admired
• Brother-in-law’s preface addresses anxiety about women writers: “…it is the work of a woman, honored, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanor, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and more than so, these poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments” (qtd. in Cowell 395)
• Her poetry “consistently reflects the Puritan spiritual and communal vision that informed her life” (Cowell 395)
• Yet “the poet’s voice becomes distinct and individual, revealing tensions between conventional literary subject matter and her own experience, between rebellion against and acquiescence to her frontier circumstances, between her love of this world nad her concern for the afterlife of Puritan doctrine” (Cowell 395)

 
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, editor.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume A.  NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
Cowell, Pattie. “Anne Bradstreet.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume A. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 394-395.