Born probably in 1612 in Northampton, England, Anne Dudley was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, chief steward to Theophilus Clinton, the Puritan Earl of Lincoln. In 1628 she married Simon Bradstreet, a protÄgÄ of the Earl╒s, and in 1630 accompanied him and her parents to America. They were members of John Winthrop╒s party, the first settlers on Massachusetts Bay. At first dismayed by the rude life of the settlement, she soon reconciled herself to it, and, in the midst of her husband╒s public duties╤he was an assistant in the Massachusetts Company and was twice governor of the colony╤and her private ones as mother of eight, she found time to write poetry. Her early work, largely imitative and influenced by that of the sixteenth-century French poet Du Bartas, was conventional, dull, and easily forgotten. It was first published in London (where, unknown to her, her brother-in-law, the Reverend John Woodbridge, had taken a copy of her manuscript) in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.
Bradstreet╒s later work, unpublished until after her death, became her chief claim to attention. Less derivative, it was often, as in ╥Contemplations,╙ graceful and pleasant, and occasionally, as in ╥To My Dear and Loving Husband,╙ deeply moving in its simple beauty. Much of it concerned her personal reflections, and the warmth and frank humanity that pervaded them struck a welcome contrast to the Puritan stereotype. She died on September 16, 1672, in North Andover, Massachusetts. In 1678 an American edition of The Tenth Muse appeared under the new title Several Poems Compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning and included some of her later work. The first satisfactory edition of her work was edited by John Harvey Ellis in 1867.
