Mistress Bradstreet (40 page)

Only her son Simon, Anne’s most literary child, commemorated his mother’s demise in his journal with an entry that was oddly reminiscent of Anne’s own words upon her father’s death. He longed “to walk in her steps . . . so wee might one day have a happy & glorious greeting,” just as Anne had hoped to “follo[w]” her father’s “pious footsteps” to heaven.
¹
And yet, despite Simon’s diary entry, Anne’s death was greeted with an echoing silence, at least from the perspective of the historian. The great elegist had no one to memorialize her.

It was not that her family did not grieve. Indeed, Anne’s death left Simon and her children bereft. In the months before she died, her two younger sons had gotten into trouble with the law, as though they wanted their mother to know they still needed her supervision and were not yet ready for her to go. None of the other Bradstreet children had ever strayed like this, and perhaps Simon shielded Anne from their misdemeanors. John was caught “smoking late at night” with his buddies, and Dudley had been seen “shooting pistols and drinking in the Quartermaster’s house.” Both young men were dragged before the county court on May 1, and Anne would have to have been very ill not to be aware of their “crimes.”
²

Their mother’s teachings were not so easily forgotten, and Dudley and John pulled themselves together after the chastening experience of an official remonstrance from the court’s officials. John went on to become a successful gentleman farmer in Topsfield, the next town over, and Dudley grew into a “leading citizen” of Andover, “serving as town clerk, selectman, magistrate, and deputy of the General Court.”
³
Mercy, Anne would have been glad to know, got married only a month after her mother’s death and went on to bear eight children, just as her mother had. With one exception—her daughter Dorothy died in childbirth—all of Anne’s children lived to a ripe old age and contributed to New England with the pious zeal and talent bequeathed to them by their parents. Even while Puritanism as a religious movement began to decline, they and their progeny kept Anne’s ideals alive, becoming ministers, lawyers, doctors, and leaders of American society. For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of her descendants.
⁴

Simon himself went on to live another thirty years. But he mourned Anne’s death for four years—an extremely long period for an eligible New England Puritan widower to remain unwed—appearing inconsolable to the many eager widows who regarded him as an excellent catch. Finally he married another Anne, the widow of a Captain Gardner, who had been killed in King Philip’s War against the Indians.

Simon also remained true to the Dudley tradition of public service. He was governor from 1679 to 1686 and then again at the end of his life, when he was called in 1689 to rescue the colony, in crisis over the loss of its charter. In his final years, Simon proved that as well as being an idealistic, orthodox Puritan, he was also a compassionate and reasonable man. He was one of the few heroes of the witchcraft crisis in Salem, serving as a moderating force during the hysteria in 1692, as he was profoundly disturbed by the excesses of the trials and the many executions. When he died, all of New England grieved the loss of such a noble public servant.

ANNE MUST HAVE SUSPECTED
that her family would be heartbroken but mute after her demise. She knew her loved ones well. Besides, she knew what happened after women died. How could she forget the silence that had greeted her own mother’s death? Even though she was a celebrity of sorts—the only real poet of her generation, a spokesperson for New England as well as a public figure in her own right—she had long been aware that if she wanted to be remembered, she would have to create her own legacy; and of course, this is what she had done, leaving behind a spiritual guidebook for her children and for future New Englanders.

For two hundred years, her strategy worked. Only after the Civil War did her name disappear from the lists of notable American poets, not to be restored until the modernist poet Conrad Aiken in 1912 placed her poems at the beginning of his famous American anthology of poetry. Since then, her reputation has been revived in fits and starts. In 1953 the great poet John Berryman turned to her for inspiration, advancing his own career with his poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.”
⁵
In the 1970s her reputation enjoyed another upsurge during the feminist commitment to uncovering “lost” women in history. Now, as a matter of course, her poems can be found in most American literature anthologies.

Anne had labored to ensure her written legacy, working to create a fair copy of her emendations to
The Tenth Muse
before she died. Six years after her death, the second edition of her work was published in Boston, probably by Anne’s old admirer John Rogers, the husband of her niece.
⁶
This volume was very different from
The Tenth Muse
because Anne had had the opportunity to revise her early poems and include new ones. She inserted “The Flesh and the Spirit” and “Contemplations,” and so the book as a whole reflected her mature commitment to New England and her use of the Puritan “plaine style.”

In an interesting gesture of self-awareness, Anne had decided against John Woodbridge’s title (
The Tenth Muse
) for this edition, and the book went to press as
Several Poems.
At this point in her life it must have seemed safe enough to acknowledge the truth: She had never thought of herself as a “muse” and in fact had always had a rocky relationship with those Greek goddesses. She was not a woman who inspired poetry but one who wrote it. Her readers, especially her male sponsors, had insisted on thinking of her this way, and she had at first complied, knowing that self-effacement was the only way her work would be accepted in her society.

Nonetheless, even fear of recriminations could not stop her from protesting against such strictures and proclaiming her worth, as one female character she had created many years before had declared:

Who is’t that dare, or can, compare with me?

My excellencies are so great, so many,

I am confounded, fore I speak of any.
⁷

In the end Anne had won. She would no longer be the nameless tenth muse but would be remembered as a flesh-and-blood woman, the author of a book of poetry that changed the way people would think about America, about women, and about American literature. Despite her modesty in life, she would be the star of a story that would be told for centuries, the tale of what one individual, even a person of exceedingly “small frame,” could accomplish if she were brave enough, smart enough, and like the country she had helped create, boldly independent.

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT
have come into existence without my agent, Brettne Bloom. I have relied on her faith in the importance of Anne’s story and on her wisdom throughout the process of writing
Mistress Bradstreet.
I am especially grateful to Michael Janeway for introducing me to Brettne, Ike Williams, and Jill Kneerim, and their literary agency, Kneerim and Williams at Fish and Richardson.

I am also indebted to my dear editor, Asya Muchnick, who “curtailed” hours from her sleep to give this book the benefit of her skill and intelligence, and to her wonderful assistant, Zainab Zakari, for her good cheer and practical assistance. Thank you also to Deborah Baker for believing in
Mistress Bradstreet
from the very beginning and to Peggy Freudenthal and DeAnna Satre for all of their hard work copyediting this manuscript.

Many people at various institutions have helped support this book, especially Sally Hinkle at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Pat Boulos at the Boston Athenaeum, Anne Bentley and Megan Milford at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Sue Ellen Holmes and Jill Baker at the Stevens Memorial Library in North Andover, Massachusetts. I am also grateful to The Waring School in Beverly, Massachusetts, for providing me with office space for so many years, and to Deborah Coull, the creator-owner of the most important beauty salon in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

David Hall, Laura Korobkin, Jill Lepore, and Rosanna Warren gave me superlative and generous guidance when I was writing my dissertation on Anne. A generous postdoctoral fellowship from Boston University allowed me to begin writing this book. Thank you to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Mary Beth Norton, David Hall, and Francis Bremer for reading selected chapters of the early manuscript and catching many of my mistakes. Those that are left are due to my errors in judgment, not theirs.

My family and friends have provided me with tireless support. I am especially grateful to Geoffrey and Brooks Richon for their loving patience. Thank you also to Carolyn Cooke, Paul Fisher, Laila Goodman, Carol Hong Richon, Johanna Rittenburg, and all of my running buddies for listening to me over so many miles.

Finally, this book could not have been written without the babysitters: Talia Allenburg, Charlee Bianchini, Ben Dulong, Olivia Gale, Ben Glickstein, Max, Becky, and Julia Lang, Casey and Reeve Moir, Margot Morse, Clea Paine, Luke Schoel, Nicole Simpson, Chet Sharp, Danielle Smick, Chris Stodolski, Becky White, and Lyda Winfield.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE:
Arrival

1. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in
Works,
241.
(back to text)

2. Francis Higginson had written, “All Europe is not able to afford so great Fires as New-England. A poor servant here that is to possesse but 50 acres of land, may afford to give more wood for Timber and Fire . . . than many Noble men in England can afford to do.” Quoted in Cronon,
Changes in the Land,
25.
(back to text)

3. See Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker’s description of the Puritans’ identification with the Jews in
The Puritan Oligarchy: The Founding of American Civilization
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947).
(back to text)

4. It was only many years later that Anne would describe how she resisted the New World. See “Autobiography,” in
Works,
241.
(back to text)

5. Morgan,
Puritan Dilemma,
57.
(back to text)

6. Higginson,
New England’s Plantation
(1630), quoted in White,
Anne Bradstreet,
iii.
(back to text)

7. Winthrop, “Saturday, 12 [June],”
Journal of John Winthrop,
ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 27.
(back to text)

8. Francis Bremer writes, “Endecott in the summer of 1629 had supervised the erection of a large home, designed as a place for the new governor to live . . . on a neck of land protruding into Massachusetts Bay between the Mystic and Charles rivers.” In Bremer,
Winthrop,
192.
(back to text)

9. Cronon gives a complete description of Indian agricultural technique in
Changes in the Land,
chaps. 1 and 2.
(back to text)

10. Winthrop, “Saturday, 12 [June],”
Journal of John Winthrop,
ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 27.
(back to text)

11. Bremer,
Winthrop,
193; ed. J. Franklin Jameson,
Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence,
1628-1651 (New York: Scribner’s, 1910), 66.
(back to text)

CHAPTER TWO:
Lilies and Thorns

1. John Cotton, “Limitation of Government,” in
American Puritans,
ed. Miller, 85.
(back to text)

2. Quoted in Ziff,
Career of John Cotton,
62.
(back to text)

3. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in
Works,
240-41.
(back to text)

4. “Beclouded . . .” is from a later poem, “For Deliverance from a Fever,” in
Works,
257, line 11. All other phrases are from “Autobiography,” in Bradstreet,
Works,
240.
(back to text)

5. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in
Works,
240-41
.
(back to text)

6. Shepard, “The Journal,” in McGiffert,
God’s Plot,
93.
(back to text)

7. Ibid., 98.
(back to text)

8. Edmund Morgan characterizes Dudley as “immature,” “lack[ing] in discretion,” “col[d]” and “belligeren[t],” in
Puritan Dilemma,
103-4
. Bradstreet, “To the Memory of My Dear and Ever Honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq. Who Deceased, July
31, 1653
, and of His Age 77,” in
Works,
202, line 43.
(back to text)

9. Bradstreet, “To the Memory . . . ,” in
Works,
202, lines
42, 80
.
(back to text)

10. Ibid., lines
10, 46
.
(back to text)

11. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” 243; “The Vanity of All Worldly Things,” in
Works,
219, lines
1-2
; “The Flesh and the Spirit,” in ibid.,
215-16
, lines
7, 27
.
(back to text)

12. White,
Anne Bradstreet,
37.
(back to text)

13. Bradstreet, “An Epitaph on My Dear and Ever-Honoured Mother, Mrs. Dorothy Dudley, Who Deceased December
27, 1643
, and of Her Age, 61,” in
Works,
204, lines
17, 16, 2, 11, 13
.
(back to text)

14. In the two centuries since the Black Death, England’s population was exploding once again, and there was not enough land or food to sustain its growth. In response to years of poor harvests, the gentry had invested in an extensive project of draining the fens to create more arable fields and grazing land, and they relied on the expert knowledge of their Dutch neighbors, whose sophisticated network of canals was now legendary.
(back to text)