Mistress Bradstreet : The Untold Life of America's First Poet

From Publishers Weekly
When Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) published her first book of poetry, The Tenth Muse, in 1650, she called it the "ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain." Yet, as poet Gordon (Two Girls on a Raft) demonstrates in this plodding and unilluminating biography, Bradstreet uttered those words more out of self-defense than regret. From her adolescence to the publication of her book, the Puritan poet viewed her work as a vocation that enabled her to worship God in vivid homespun images and to express sometimes complex theological ideas in plain language. Gordon depicts Bradstreet as a woman of her time, required to submit to her father and husband in religious and social matters. Gordon demonstrates that Bradstreet nevertheless benefited from the privileges of a literary education. Her family's social and religious circle included the most important figures of the early 17th century, from John Winthrop to Roger Williams. While her book was very popular at its publication, Bradstreet's reputation waned after the Civil War, to be recovered in the 20th century by her influence on poets such as Anne Sexton and John Berryman. Regrettably, Gordon's wearisome focus on the well-known facts of Bradstreet's upbringing leaves little room for a significant exploration of her poetic life and works. 8 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Kirkus Reviews
A thorough, occasionally whimsical, and hearteningly feminist take on the life of early Puritan pioneer and pundit Anne Bradstreet.


LIBRARY JOURNAL
"Bradstreet's life is well imagined, and it is this quality that makes the book a delightful read."


Sam Coale, PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
"Charlotte Gordon . . . does a masterful job of re-creating Bradstreet's world."


—Michael Kenney, Boston Globe
"[A] lively biography… showing that Bradstreet is as exceptional a person as the 17th-century New England she lived in."


—Kirkus Reviews
"A thorough, occasionally whimsical, and hearteningly feminist take on the life of early Puritan pioneer and pundit Anne Bradstreet."


—Sam Coale, The Providence Journal
"Gordon does a masterful job of recreating Bradstreet’s world."


—J. Peter Bergman, The Berkshire Eagle
"Gordon has contributed to the human understanding of what lies at the core of this country and its people."


Book Description
DESCRIPTION: An illuminating biography of Anne Bradstreet, the first writer--and the first bestseller--to emerge from the wilderness of the New World. Puritan Anne Bradstreet arrived in Massachusetts in 1630, 18 years old and newly married to Simon Bradstreet, the son of a minister. She was accompanied by her imperious father, Thomas Dudley, and a powerful clutch of Protestant dissenters whose descendants would become the founding fathers of the country. Bradstreetís story is a rich one, filled with drama and surprises, among them a passionate marriage, intellectual ferment, religious schisms, mortal illness, and Indian massacres. This is the story of a young woman and poet of great feeling struggling to unearth a language to describe the country in which she finds herself. And it also offers a rich and complex portrait of early America, the Puritans, and their trials and values; a legacy that continues to shape our country to the present day.


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Poet Gordon offers a thorough, occasionally whimsical, and hearteningly feminist take on the life of early Puritan pioneer and pundit Anne Bradstreet. The dutiful, extremely learned, favorite daughter of Puritan lawyer and steward Thomas Dudley of Lincolnshire, England, Anne Bradstreet was 18 when her entire family set out in 1630 to lead the Great Migration of Puritans into Massachusetts. Already married to Simon Bradstreet, a devoted, amiable assistant to her father, Anne was reluctant to leave the luxuries of England and did not immediately take to the punishing emigrant life in New England, where (once they survived the horrific trans-Atlantic crossing) many presently died of disease, cold, and malnutrition. But Dudley and his clan were on a godly mission to purge themselves of the corruption of the Old World, to separate from papist idolatry, and found the New Jerusalem-and they constantly moved to forge new Puritan strongholds, from newly founded Boston to Ipswich to Andover. In between bearing and caring for eight children, Anne turned her powerful intellect and encyclopedic knowledge to writing righteous poetry-an inadmissible and risky ambition for a woman in Puritan society, where the famous Anne Hutchinson herself had been drummed out for refusing to toe the theological line, as Gordon amply portrays. While the evidence depicts Bradstreet's relationship with her husband as passionate, Simon remains a mystery, as Anne developed intense intellectual friendships with men of her circle who encouraged her writing, such as the preacher Nathaniel Ward and her brother-in-law John Woodbridge, who would take her manuscript of poems to England and have them published as the instantbestseller The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Gordon, a Boston Univ. doctoral fellow, devotes careful attention to the roots of Puritanism and to portrayals of its major players, such as John Cotton; her own sensitivity as a poet renders rapturous readings of Bradstreet's writing. Lends exciting textual possibilities to the turmoil beneath Bradstreet's "glowing breast." Agent: Brettne Bloom/Hill & Barlow Agency


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