Poet's Corner
Anne Bradstreet
Also known as: Anne Dudley (birth name)
Nationality: American English
Career:
Poet and prose writer
Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley around 1612 in England to a Puritan family. Her father Thomas Dudley was steward to the Earl of Lincoln. Because of Dudley's high position, his daughter received an excellent education. She moved in 1630 with her parents and husband Simon Bradstreet to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where her husband and father served as governors of the settlement. As a New England colonist, Bradstreet encountered a life of hardship to which she was unaccustomed, but despite illness and the difficulties of raising her eight children in the American wilderness, she found time to write. By the age of thirty she had composed most of her poetry. When her brother-in-law John Woodbridge returned to England in 1623, he took with him the manuscript of Bradstreet's poems. Without her knowledge, he published them, entitling the collection The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. The volume met with immediate success in London. Surprised by the work's reception, though disturbed by its unpolished state, Bradstreet began to revise the poems, though some of these alterations were lost when her home burned in 1666. Six years after her death in 1672, the revisions, along with a number of new pieces, were published under the title Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight.
Source: Exploring Poetry, Gale.