The turning point in Anne Bradstreet’s life came in June 1630, when after a nearly three-month voyage of “close quarter, raw nerves, sickness, hysteria and salt meats,” the English ship Arbella landed in America. Anne, raised in Elizabethan culture and educated in a vast library on an earl’s... more

The turning point in Anne Bradstreet’s life came in June 1630, when after a nearly three-month voyage of “close quarter, raw nerves, sickness, hysteria and salt meats,” the English ship Arbella landed in America. Anne, raised in Elizabethan culture and educated in a vast library on an earl’s estate, found that her “heart rose [in protest]” at the wilderness of New England. Rugged conditions could, and did, kill many of greater hardihood and renown than this seventeen-year-old bride. She, while raising eight children and living as the proper wife of an up-and-coming governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, worked out her observations, frustrations, love of family, illness, faith in God and ultimate joy through poetry, at a time when women’s scholarship was thought to threaten their sanity, and the fight to survive kept most everyone, man or woman, from pursuing the arts. In so doing, Anne became the first permanent North American to publish a commercial book, and remained the foremost woman in American poetry until the time of Emily Dickinson.