Anne Bradstreet's biography

Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) was born in England, the daughter of a "well borne woman" of modest wealth and a father who was the steward of the country estate of the Earl of Lincoln. Both the earl and Bradstreet's parents were Puritans, and she was given a much better education than most young women of her time. At sixteen she married Simon Bradstreet, also a Puritan, and two years later, in 1630, she, her husband, and her parents sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They lived first in Boston and in 1664 moved to North Andover, where Bradstreet lived for the rest of her life.

In 1650, without her knowledge, her brother-in-law took a gathering of her poems to London. The collection was the first to be published by anyone living in the North American colonies, and the book ...