Anne Bradstreet's Biography Summerization

Biography by Ann Woodlief, Illustrations by Ladonna Gulley Warrick

Anne Bradstreet was born to a nonconformist former soldier of Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Dudley. He traveled in 1630 for America with the Massachusetts Bay Company, his family and son-in-law, Simon Bradstreet. When he married Anne Dudley, his childhood sweetheart, he was 25 years old and she was 16. The voyage to America was difficult and many people died from the experience. Life on the journey differed greatly from the beautiful estate that Anne Bradstreet was used to, because it was rough and cold. Anne told her children in her memoirs that "I found a new world and new manners at which my heart rose [up in protest.]" Anne did, however, decide to join the church at Boston. White writes that "instead of looking outward and writing her observations on this unfamiliar scene with its rough and fearsome aspects, she let her homesick imagination turn inward, marshalled the images from her store of learning and dressed them in careful homespun garments."

Historically, Anne's identity is mainly linked to her prominent father and husband. They both were governors of Massachusetts who left portraits and many records. She appreciated their love and protection, but "any woman who sought to use her wit, charm, or intelligence in the community at large found herself ridiculed, banished, or executed by the Colony's powerful group of male leaders." The role she was expected to play was in the home. She was expected to be separated from the affairs of church and stat, even "deriving her ideas of God deom the contemplations of her husband's excellencies," according to one document.

The situation she was in was made clear to her through the fate of her good friend, Anne Hutchinson, who was also intelligent, educated, of a prosperous family and extremely pious. Hutchinson was a mother of 14 and an incredible speaker, and she held prayer meetings in which women discussed and debated religious and ethical ideas. She believed that the Holy Spirit lived within justified people, therefore good works were not necessary for admission to the church. This belief, however, was considered heretical; she was then labeled a Jezebel and banished, eventually slain in an Indian attack in New York. This explains why Bradstreet was not so anxious to publish her poetry and liked to keep her more personal works private. Bradstreet wrote epitaphs for both of her parents. These not only showed her love for them, but they showed them as models of how Puritans should behave.

There is not much evidence of Anne's life in Massachusetts besides that given in her poetry: no portrait or grave-maker, although there is a house in Ipswich, MA. She moved many times with her family, always to areas in which Simon could get more property and political power. There, they would have been very vulnerable to Indian attack; families of powerful Puritans were often kidnapped and ransomed. Through her poems, we can see that she deeply loved her husband and greatly missed him when he left frequently on colony business to England and other settlements. On the contrary, though, her feelings towards him, as well as her Purtian faith and position as a woman in the Puritan community, seemed a bit mixed. Within about 10 years, she and her husband had 8 children, all of whom survived childhood. She was often sick and expected to die, especially during childbirth, but she lived to the age of 60.

The poetry Anne Bradstreet wrote seemed to be mainly for herself, her family, and her friends, many of whom were well educated. Her early poetry, taken to England by her brother-in-law (possibly without her permission), appeared as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America in 1650 when she was 38 and it sold well in England. Her later works were more private, personal, and original than those in The Tenth Muse. These were not published while she was alive, but she shared this poetry with her family and friends.

Anne Bradstreet apparently took herself very seriously as a poet and an intellectual. She was well-read in history, science, and literature, studying her craft and developing a confident poetic voice. She "apologized" to Puritans who believed women should be silent, modest, and living in the private rather than the public sphere. Her apologies were quite likely mroe ironic than sincere.

Although she often questioned the power of the male hierarchy and God (or the harsh Puritan concept of a judgemental God), she was a Puritan. Creative conflict often arose in her poetry because of her love of the natural and the physical world, as well as the spiritual. She finds hope in the future promises of religion, and great pleasures in the reality of the present. According to the Puritan perspective, she realized that she perhaps should not indulge in the pleasures of the present. Anne Bradstreet's poetry was generally ignored until "rediscovered" by 20th century feminists. The critics found many artistic qualities in her work.