Anne Bradstreet Was Puritan Goodwife and Colonial America’s First Published Poet

No authentic portrait of Anne Bradshaw exists.  Puritan women were generally not considered important enough for the expense of a painting.  She is usually depicted as a generic Puritan woman of her era.  We know that she was dark haired, small, and plagued by ill health and the toll of eight childbirths.  Her attractive face was scarred by small pox. 

It is easy to identify the essential founder of American literature if you put preconceived notions aside.  Despite a near glut of over educated clergy and highly literate laymen, the first poetic voice to emerge from the struggling colonies in New England and first published poet to rise from the stony soil was a sickly young woman, the mother of eight, who was discouraged in every way from expressing herself.

Anne Dudley was born in North Hamptonshire, England on or about March 20 by the old Julian Calendar in 1612.  Her father Thomas was a Puritan leader and her mother Dorothy Yorke was the well-read daughter of a noble family. Her parents took Simon Bradstreet, the son of a minister, into their household when his father died when she was 16 and he was 25.  Anne married the man who had been a virtual brother to her.

 

Bradstreet was commemorated by this stained glass window in the dissenter's chapel in her English hometown.

Young Bradstreet became a junior officer of the Massachusetts Bay Company and her father an investor and supporter.  In 1630 the whole extended family boarded the Arabella, the flagship of the Winthrop Fleet of 11 vessels that brought the first large wave of the great Puritan Migration to re-enforce the tiny, struggling colonies planted two years earlier.

Thomas Dudley soon became Governor John Winthrop’s Deputy and Bradstreet took the third ranking post of administrator.  Frail young Anne had suffered on the arduous sea voyage and found the primitive life of a frontier village hard.  She suffered from a variety of ailments, including smallpox which scarred her face, and a joint condition, probably rheumatoid arthritis.  Both her husband and father frequently traveled to other Puritan villages in their duties.  She passed these times when she was bed ridden by studying her father’s extensive library.  She mastered not only the Bible, as expected, but dense theological texts and works in Latin, French, and German.  She also read and adored poetry and began to compose verse of her own which she shared privately with her family.

 

Simon Bradshaw in middle age.  Anne's husband was a member of the Puritan governing elite.

Despite her frail health and scholarly bent, Anne was a devoted wife.  She gave birth to eight children who she doted on.

As the Colony prospered, so did her family’s prospects.  They helped establish the new principal city of Boston and in a few years moved across the Charles River to New Town, soon to be renamed Cambridge.  In 1636 both her husband and father became founders of Harvard University, from which two of her sons would later graduate.

Anne Bradtreet was close friend of Anne Hutchinson and shared many of her religious opinions.  She witnessed Hutchinson's persecution, exile, and eventual hanging at the hands of Governor Winthrop, her husband's mentor and closest associate. 

The following year Anne received a strong lesson on the perils of being caught making public expressions when her close friend, Anne Hutchinson, with whom she privately shared many opinions, was brought to trial before Governor Winthrop and sentenced to exile from the colony, expected to be a death sentence by starvation among the “savages” and eventually execution by hanging for heresy.

The family moved twice more, first to Ipswich and finally to North Andover in 1640.

 

The title page of the English first edition of Bradstreet's poem.  Note the publisher's address.

It was with some consternation that Anne learned that her brother-in-law the Rev. John Woodbridge had secretly copied her poems and taken them to London where they were published in 1650 under the title, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, by a Gentlewoman of those Parts.  None-the-less, she was proud of the accomplishment, and the laudatory interest with which it was received. 

Anne continued to write, although not for publication.  Here themes were as wide ranging as her reading—by this time she had amassed a personal library of perhaps 800 books, perhaps the greatest depository in the colony.  She touched on religious themes, but also closely observed nature, politics, and domestic life.  She wrote both short pieces and long, almost epic verse dense with allusion.  She composed a series of devotions for her family’s private use,

Increasingly crippled and bed ridden more frequently, Anne suffered the loss of a beloved daughter and other relatives and a devastating 1666 house fire that destroyed virtually everything the family owned, including Anne’s precious library.  Despite these reversals she continued to passionately embrace life and thank God.

Bradstreet's last house in North Andover.  It still stands and is marked as the "Governor Bradstreet House."  

Due to her family’s prominence, they were able to rebuild a comfortable home.  Anne died there in on September 16, 1672 at the age of 60. 

An expanded American edition of The Tenth Muse including several unpublished poems was published posthumously in 1678 in Boston as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning.  Despite the lingering Puritan disdain for expression by women, no less an august personage than Cotton Mather himself admired the work.

In the mid-19th Century, the religious poems she composed for her family were published as Contemplations and brought about renewed interest in her as a poet.  By the early 1900’s, however, her work was dismissed as a historical curiosity rather than as a substantial contribution to literature.

 

Bradstreet's last house in North Andover.  It still stands and is marked as the "Governor Bradstreet House." 

The rise in women’s studies set off a re-assessment of her work, which is now regarded as both highly original in many respects and well constructed within the poetic disciplines of her time.

 

Anne Bradstreet made other contributions to American letters, culture, and public life through her many descendents who include Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Rev. William Ellery Channing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Jr., Richard Henry Dana, abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Sarah Orne Jewett, Herbert Hoover, Justice David Sauter, and actors John Lithgow and Sarah Jessica Parker.  

 

Sometime after the London publication of The Tenth Muse Anne wrote her thoughts of mingled shame and pride in a poem, naturally.

 

The Author to Her Book

 

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,

Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

The visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.

I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save homespun cloth I’ th house I find.

In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.

In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,

And take thy way where yet thou art not known;

If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;

And for thy mother, she alas is poor,

Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

 

—Anne Bradstreet