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Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear and Loving Husband"

BIOGRAPHY

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Anne Bradstreet as imagined by LaDonna Gulley Warrick

Biography by Ann Woodlief

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 to a nonconformist former soldier of Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Dudley, who managed the affairs of the Earl of Lincoln. In 1630 the Dudley family sailed for America with John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay Company. Also sailing was his associate and son-in-law, Simon Bradstreet, who at twenty-five had married his childhood sweetheart, 16-year old Anne. Anne had been well-tutored in literature and history, in Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, as well as English. Although she read few women poets she was familiar with most of the male poets (see Major English Poets of the 17th Century) writing at the time and would later adopt some of their themes and stylistic mannerisms.

The voyage on the Arbella with John Winthrop took three months and was quite difficult, with several people dying from the experience. Life was rough and cold; a change from the beautiful estate with its well-stocked library where Anne had spent many hours. As Anne tells her children in her memoirs, "I found a new world and new manners at which my heart rose [up in protest]." She decided to join the church at Boston, and as Elizabeth Wade White writes, "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 of somewhat archaic meter, to the glory of God and for the expression of an inquiring mind and sensitive, philosophical spirit."

Historically, Anne's identity is primarily linked to her prominent father and husband, both governors of Massachusetts who left portraits and numerous records. Though she appreciated their love and protection, "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." Her domain was to be domestic, separated from the linked affairs of church and state, even "deriving her ideas of God from the contemplations of her husband's excellencies," according to one document [1].

This situation was surely made painfully clear to her in the fate of her friend Anne Hutchinson, also intelligent, educated, of a prosperous family and deeply religious. The mother of fourteen children and a dynamic speaker, Hutchinson held prayer meetings where women debated religious and ethical ideas. Her belief that the Holy Spirit dwells within a person, and not only as a result of good works, was considered heretical; she was labeled a Jezebel and banished, eventually slain in an Indian attack in New York (see Anne Hutchinson: American Jezebel or Woman of Courage?, a paper by Rachel Cunningham). Perhaps it was the example of Hutchinson that made Bradstreet not anxious to publish her poetry and keep her more personal works private.

Bradstreet wrote epitaphs for both her mother and her father which not only show her love for them but also show them as models of male and female behavior in the Puritan culture.

"An Epitaph on my dear and ever honoured mother, Mrs. Dorothy Dudley, Who deceased December 27, 1643, and of her age, 61":

Here lies
A worthy matron of unspotted life,
A loving mother and obedient wife,
A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,
Whom oft she fed, and clothed with her store;
To servants wisely aweful, but yet kind,
And as they did, so they reward did find:
A true instructor of her family,
The which she ordered with dexterity,
The public meetings ever did frequent,
And in her closest constant hours she spent;
Religious in all her words and ways,
Preparing still for death, till end of days:
Of all her children, children lived to see,
Then dying, left a blessed memory.

Compare this with the epitaph she wrote for her father:

Within this tomb a patriot lies
That was both pious, just and wise,
To truth a shield, to right a wall,
To sectaries a whip and maul,
A magazine of history,
A prizer of good company
In manners pleasant and severe
The good him loved, the bad did fear,
And when his time with years was spent
In some rejoiced, more did lament.

1653, age 77

There is little evidence about Anne's life in Massachusetts beyond that given in her poetry—no portrait, no grave marker or Bradstreet house. She and her family moved several times, always to more remote frontier areas where Simon could accumulate more property and political power. They would have been quite vulnerable to Indian attack; families of powerful Puritans were often singled out for kidnapping and ransom. Her poems tell us that she loved her husband deeply and missed him greatly when he left frequently on colony business to England and other settlements (he was a competent administrator and eventually governor). However, her feelings about him, as well as about her Puritan faith and her position as a woman in the Puritan community, seem complex and perhaps mixed. They had eight children within about ten years, all of whom survived childhood. She was frequently ill and anticipated dying, especially in childbirth, but she lived to be sixty years old.

Anne seems to have written poetry primarily for herself, her family, and her friends, many of whom were very well-educated. Her early, more imitative poetry, taken to England by her brother-in-law (possibly without her permission), appeared in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America and sold well in England. Her later works, not published in her lifetime although shared with friends and family, were more private and personal—and far more original—than those published in The Tenth Muse. Her love poetry is evident in this latter group which in style and subject matter was unique for her time, strikingly different from the poetry written by male contemporaries.

Although she may have seemed to some a strange aberration of womanhood, Bradstreet evidently took herself very seriously as an intellectual and a poet. She read widely in history, science, and literature, especially the works of Guillame du Bartas, studying her craft and gradually developing a confident poetic voice. Her "apologies" were likely more ironic than sincere, responding to those Puritans who felt women should be silent, modest, living in the private rather than the public sphere. She could be humorous with her "feminist" views, as in a poem on Queen Elizabeth I:

Now say, have women worth, or have they none
Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone?
Nay, masculines, you have taxed us long;
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason,
Know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason.

One must remember that she was a Puritan, although she sometimes had doubts, questioning the power of the male hierarchy, even questioning God (or the harsh Puritan concept of a judgmental God). Her love of nature and the physical world, as well as the spiritual, often caused creative conflict in her poetry. Though she finds great hope in the future promises of religion, she also finds great pleasures in the realities of the present, especially of her family, her home, and nature (though she realized that perhaps she should not, according to the Puritan perspective).

Although few other American women were to publish poetry for the next two hundred years, her poetry was generally ignored until "rediscovered" by feminists and critics in the twentieth century who have found many significant artistic qualities in her work.

Notes

1. White, Elizabeth Wade. Anne Bradstreet, "The Tenth Muse." 1971.

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