Ann Bradstreet was a member of the party that founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, leaving England to start a new life on an unknown continent at the age of eighteen. In spite of her frail health she bore eight children and endured the hardships of frontier life, often managing the household alone as her husband was involved in the administration of the colony and was frequently away.

She was carefully educated by her doting father and proved to be a very accomplished poet. Her work was published in England without her knowledge in 1650, making her the first published American woman, no small distinction for a colonial, Puritan woman in the middle of the seventeenth century.

"Although she may have seemed to some a strange aberration of womanhood at the time, she evidently took herself very seriously as an intellectual and a poet. She read widely in history, science, and literature, especially the works of Guillame du Bartas, studying her craft and gradually developing a confident poetic voice. Her "apologies" were very likely more a ironic than sincere, responding to those Puritans who felt women should be silent, modest, living in the private rather than the public sphere." http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/Bradstreet/bradbio.htm

Though there is much in her poetry that reflects her Puritan beliefs, what strikes me about her work is the universality of the emotional content. Her subject matter is the stuff of daily life in the feminine sphere: children and marriage and home and the death of loved ones. Her work contradicts the stereotype many of us have of the Puritans as stern and full of loathing for all that concerns the temporal world. Her poems humanize the Puritans. She expresses a love of life and joyfulness that we do not expect and reminds us of the universality of human emotions. "In Here Follows some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666" she describes her grief and anger at the loss of her possessions, and her struggle to accept her loss.

"Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best.
My pleasant things in ashes lie,
And them behold no more shall I." (p.212)

She expresses her resolve to accept her loss in terms that we would characterize as typical of her Puritan beliefs:

"I blest his name that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so it's just." (p.212)

But after all, we all have to accept loss, Puritan or not.