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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"For many, Anne Bradstreet's name is familiar from the early pages of anthologies of American poetry or from John Berryman's famous tribute to her. But few know that she was the first published poet - male or female - to emerge from the wilderness of the New World, or that her slim volume of verse was a runaway bestseller. Now, in this biography, Charlotte Gordon reveals Anne Bradstreet to be an electrifying personality at the center of one of the most fascinating periods in our country's history." "Transplanted from England to the New World in 1630, eighteen-year-old Anne was among the first waves of settlers on the unwelcoming shores of what would one day be Massachusetts. Arriving just a decade after the Pilgrims, Anne quickly had to transform herself from educated gentlewoman to frontier wife and mother. Of course, she was not alone: with her came her new husband, Simon Bradstreet; her imperious father, Thomas Dudley; and a powerful clutch of Protestant dissenters whose descendants would become our founding fathers." "Anne not only recorded her own experience, but also commented on the political and religious upheavals of her day, casting light on the hypocrisy of Old England and the promise of the New." This is the story of a woman and poet of great feeling struggling to find a language to describe the country in which she finds herself. It also offers a complex portrait of early America, the Puritans, and the trials and values whose legacy continues to shape our country to the present day.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews