East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Mistress Bradstreet, the untold life of America's first poet, by Charlotte Gordon

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages [313]-328) and index

individual biography

index present

non fiction

Mistress Bradstreet

bibliography

56608308

by Charlotte Gordon

the untold life of America's first poet

"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"--From Booklist