Orientation

Readings in the text include representative selections of her works published in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America and other occasional pieces written later. Her "Prologue" to Tenth Muse is a veritable catalog of Neo-classical poetic conventions and a protestation against male discrimination in the arts, orchestrated behind only thinly veiled antipathy for her anticipated male critics. "The Author to Her Book" reveals her reluctant pride in the unauthorized publication. She appears embarrassed at the "ill-formed offspring of [her] feeble brain." Loneliness triggers warm, passionate paeans of love in several "Letter[s] to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment." Other works she dedicated to her children and grandchildren and to the defining events of her life, not the least of which included the death of "My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet" and the "Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666."

Anne Bradstreet had prepared a "revised and enlarged" second edition of her works, eventually published posthumously as Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning in Boston, 1678.