Synopsis:
Though her work is a staple of anthologies of American poetry, Anne Bradstreet has never before been the subject of an accessible, full-scale biography for a general audience. Anne Bradstreet is known for her poem, "To My Dear and Loving Husband," among others, and through John Berryman's "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet." With her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, she became the first published poet, male or female, of the New World. Many New England towns were founded and settled by Anne Bradstreet's family or their close associates--characters who appear in these pages.
From Booklist:
*Starred Review* The first American best-seller was a book of poems by one of Massachusetts' Puritan founders, Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612-72), favorite daughter of first deputy governor Thomas Dudley and wife of future governor Simon Bradstreet. Gordon discovered Bradstreet when, in her first high-school gig, she had to teach a unit on early American literature and found that the colonial woman's subject matter--the domestic life of a pioneer and the political and religious issues and events of turbulent seventeenth-century England and its colonies--captivated her and, mirabile dictu, her students, too. Here, while she gives Bradstreet's prosodic skill its due, she really expatiates on Bradstreet's life, extrapolating its content and texture not only from Bradstreet's personally reticent writings (no journal or diary is among them) and those of her influential father, his associates, including first Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, and other friends of the Dudley family but also from documentation and research of the techniques of living in Bradstreet's England and Massachusetts--house-building and -keeping, emigration and trade by sea, founding new towns (fortunately, the colonizers already constituted a strong community), childbearing and -rearing, gardening and farming, and social organization and relations with cultural others (Native Americans and French). Written with maximal clarity and communicativeness, this is a vibrant, engaging, realistic portrayal of early colonial Massachusetts and of its fascinating biographical subject. Ray Olson
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