AnneBradstreet


 * Personal Life and Professional Life**



Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) is one of the most important figures in the history of American Literature. She was the first american female writer, and the first American female poet or author to have her works published.

In 1612, Anne Bradstreet was born in Northampton, England. Her father, Dudley, who had been a leader of volunteer soldiers in the English Reformation and Elizabethan Settlement, was then a steward to the Earl of Lincoln. Her mother Dorothy was a gentlewoman of noble heritage. Anne married with 16 years to Simon Bradstreet, assistant in the Massachusetts Bay Company. Her family emigrated to America in 1630 on the Arabella, one of the first ships to bring Puritans to New England in hopes of setting up plantation colonies. The whole journey was really difficult especially for Anne, but she and her husband managed to make a home for themselves, and raise a family. Despite her poor health, she had eight children. Unfortunatly one night the Bradstreet home was engulfed in flames. It didn't take too long for them to get back on their feet, they worked hard and Simon had a good social standing in the community. His political duties kept him traveling to various colonies on diplomatic errands. Anne stayed at home, read a lot of books and educated her children. She was really interested in poetry and wrote her own poems. They were mostly based on her life experience, and her love for her husband and family. She was a free thinker, who could even be considered an early feminist. But her health was slowly failing, she had been through many ailments, and was now afflicted with tuberculosis. Shortly after contracting the disease, she lost her daughter Dorothy to illness as well. Anne Bradstreet died on September 16, 1672, in Andover, Massachusetts, at the age 60.

Anne's poetry is based of the world around her, it is focused on domestic and religious themes. She won critical acceptance in the 20th century as a writer of enduring verse, particularly for her sequence of religious poems //"Contemplations",// which was written for her family and not published until the mid-19th century. In 1647 her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, had secretly copied Anne's work, and would later bring in to England to have it publisched. Woodbridge even admitted to it in the preface of her first collection, //"The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts"//, which was published in 1650. In 1678 "Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning" was posthumously published in America, and included one of her most famous poems, //"To My Dear and Loving Husband".//
 * Major works and Favorite themes**
 * Work**
 * Before the Birth of One of Her Children
 * A Dialogue between Old England and New
 * A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment
 * Another
 * Another (II)
 * For Deliverance From A Fever
 * Contemplations
 * In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth
 * In Reference to her Children, 23 June 1659
 * The Author to Her Book
 * The Flesh and the Spirit
 * The Four Ages of Man
 * The Prologue
 * To Her Father with Some Verses
 * To My Dear and Loving Husband
 * Upon a Fit of Sickness, Anno 1632 Aetatis Suae, 19
 * Upon Some Distemper of Body
 * Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666

She was the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1951.
 * Awards won**

Anne Bradstrett wrote her poems in the colonial Period (The Puritans) and was one of the main authors during this time. People were focused on religious and political idealism. She used this themes in her poems.
 * Period and/or Style**