Anne Bradstreet

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Standard Name: Bradstreet, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Dudley
Married Name: Anne Bradstreet
Pseudonym: A Gentlewoman of those Parts
Pseudonym: The Tenth Muse
Used Form: Anne Broadstreet
Used Form: a Gentlewoman in New-England
AB , born and brought up in seventeenth-century England, is known as the earliest poet of North America. She was a skilled and ambitious practitioner of verse history and scholarly adaptation from classical authors, but is best remembered today for her personal lyrics. Her few prose works include a brief spiritual autobiography (almost a mother's legacy) and various meditations.
Frontispiece of "An Account of Anne Bradstreet The Puritan Poetess, and Kindred Topics", ed. Luther Caldwell (Boston, 1898). Bradstreet is seen sitting at a desk, apparently paused in the act of writing for inspiration from above. She wears a black dress with a coif, big-collared shift, cuffs, and apron all in white.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships W. H. Auden
Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a...
Family and Intimate relationships Sarah Orne Jewett
Her mother, born Caroline Frances Perry , was a descendant of the earliest poet of North America, Anne Bradstreet .
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln
Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, bore eighteen children, of whom nine daughters and seven sons lived to grow up. She did not suckle them herself; if she had done so, it would probably have been...
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln
It was Anne Bradstreet 's father, an employee of the earl, who arranged this marriage.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge, 1989.
421
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Brereton
Each poem is headed by a picture, showing the thatched structure of Merlin's Cave and the stone-built royal hermitage respectively. The first poem, Merlin, is Humbly inscrib'd to Caroline ,
Brereton, Jane. Merlin. Cave, 1735.
title-page
and after imploring...
Intertextuality and Influence Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
Intertextuality and Influence Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
In this film, a comic study of the gulf between French and US culture, one of two female central characters recites a poem by Anne Bradstreet .
Londry, Michael. Email about Ruth Prawer Jhabvala film script to Isobel Grundy.
Reception Mary Oxlie
This work listed MO as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton , seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his...
Textual Features Eavan Boland
The title sequence is dedicated to those who lost a country,
Boland, Eavan. A Woman Without a Country. Carcanet Press, 2014.
27
including the poet's grandmother, who was one of those living outside history (a favourite phrase of EB ). Her grandmother died in 1909...
Textual Features Elizabeth Bury
Here she concludes by quoting, unascribed, eight lines of poetry by Congreve beginning When Lesbia first I saw, so heavenly Fair.
Bury, Elizabeth. An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury. Editor Bury, Samuel, Printed by and for J. Penn and sold by J. Sprint, 1720.
189
Such a worldly quotation seems out of character. Most of the quotations in...
Textual Features Alicia D'Anvers
In the allegorical dialogue, Belgia is the mother and Britannia the wife of the hero Albion (William). While giving voice to nations in their standard female personifications was a fairly frequent trope, it is not...
Textual Features Elizabeth Grymeston
EG 's prefatory epistle offers advice on the conduct of his life to her son Bernye, and further good counsel is prominent. This book (which also includes poems and prayers) is both the earliest extant...
Textual Features Sylvia Kantaris
This volume, through its title, invokes a whole tradition of women's poetry. Sappho was the first to bear the honorific nickname of tenth muse, which was later freely bestowed on writing women (like Anna Maria van Schurman
Textual Features Diana Primrose
DP 's continuing admiration for and loyalty to Elizabeth (like that of Anne Bradstreet a few years later) seems to reflect proto-feminist attitudes; but it may be angled chiefly at the current political situation: in...
Textual Production Adrienne Rich
In this book AR continues to reconstruct a feminist literary tradition through such essays as Vesuvius at Home: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson, The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet, Woman Observing, Preserving, Conspiring, Surviving...

Timeline

By early March 2009
Elaine Showalter published A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

Texts

Bradstreet, Anne. Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight. Printed by John Foster, 1678.
Bradstreet, Anne. “The Introduction”. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, edited by Joseph R. McElrath and Allan P. Robb, Twayne, 1981, p. xi - xlii.
Bradstreet, Anne. The Tenth Muse. Stephen Bowtell, 1650.
Bradstreet, Anne, and Adrienne Rich. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Editor Hensley, Jeannine, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.