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Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–September 16 1672) was the first published American woman writer.
Bradstreet was born in Northampton, England, the daughter of Governor Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke Dudley. At the age of sixteen she married Simon Bradstreet, an employee and future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Anne and Simon emigrated to America along with Anne's parents in 1630 aboard the Arabella. Bradstreet wrote poetry on domestic and religious themes, and in 1650 her brother-in-law published The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, which appeared in London, without her knowledge. In 1678 her revised version Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning was posthumously published in America. She died in Andover, Massachusetts, and is buried in the Old Burying Point in Salem, Massachusetts.
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was a poet writing in America, she was the first woman in America writing poetry, and the first poet writing in English in America. She was born in England and was a colonist. Her father, Thomas Dudley, was chief steward to the Puritan Earl of Lincoln, and she grew up in cultured circumstances. She married Simon Bradstreet when she was 16, and two years later she, her husband, and her parents sailed with other Puritans to settle on Massachusetts Bay. She had an education though at that time women were not educated. This allowed her to express herself in poetry. She did poetry in her free time. Her poems are religious; they look for God in everyday life. Furthermore, much of her poetry is based on observation of the world around her. Her poems were published without her knowledge in England and were very successful. This act resulted in her embarrassment; she did not want to be famous. Long considered primarily of historical interest, she won critical acceptance in the 20th century as a writer of enduring verse, particularly for her sequence of religious poems Contemplations, written for her family and not published until the mid-19th century.
The first American edition of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650. was published in revised and expanded form as Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (1678). Most of the poems in the first edition are long and rather dully imitative works based on the standard poetic conventions of the time, but the last two poems, Of the vanity of all worldly creatures and David's Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan, are individual and genuine in their recapitulation of her own feelings.
Her later poems, written for her family, show her spiritual growth as she came fully to accept the Puritan creed. She also wrote more personal poems of considerable beauty, her thoughts before childbirth and her response to the death of a grandchild. These shorter poems benefit from their lack of imitation and didacticism. Her prose works include Meditations, a collection of succinct and pithy aphorisms.
The Prologue discusses being a woman writer; she realizes the difficulty of her position. She thinks it’s an exceptional case for her; a needle better fits a woman’s hand than a pen–says the ideology. There are many Puritan writers, but Anne Bradstreet is an exception. Most of the Puritan writings take the form of a sermon and have a didactic purpose. Their beliefs had a great impact; the Puritan mentality is still a great influence in America today.
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