Mistress Bradstreet Read online

  Copyright © 2005 by Charlotte Gordon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Warner Faith

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.hachettebookgroupusa.com

  First eBook Edition: March 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02868-4

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One: Arrival

  Chapter Two: Lilies and Thorns

  Chapter Three: Sempringham

  Chapter Four: A Man of Exemplary Discretion and Fidelity

  Chapter Five: God Is Leaving England

  Chapter Six: Preparedness

  Chapter Seven: Our Appointed Time

  Chapter Eight: The Crossing

  Chapter Nine: New World, New Manners

  Chapter Ten: Upon My Son

  Chapter Eleven: Enemies Within

  Chapter Twelve: Ipswich

  Chapter Thirteen: Such Things as Belong to Women

  Chapter Fourteen: Old England and New

  Chapter Fifteen: Now Sister, Pray Proceed

  Chapter Sixteen: Foolish, Broken, Blemished Muse

  Chapter Seventeen: The Tenth Muse

  Chapter Eighteen: Farewell Dear Child

  Epilogue: A Voice in the Wilderness

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About The Author

  ALSO BY CHARLOTTE GORDON

  Two Girls on a Raft

  When The Grateful Dead Came to St. Louis

  To all those whose stories have gone untold

  and to

  Julie Miles Gordon

  Preface

  I AM SOMEONE WHO BECAME OBSESSED, passionately so, with a woman who lived nearly four hundred years ago, a woman who lived right down the street from me. Sometimes I wonder if our subjects choose us or if we choose them.

  In 1991 I was twenty-eight years old and terrified because I had just gotten my first real teaching job. I had moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a small New England village a few miles from the sea. Now I had to get high school students excited about poetry and, at the same time, teach them something about American history and literature. It happened that Anne Bradstreet was the first author on the course syllabus. I did not know much about her, aside from the fact that she was the “first” American poet and always appeared on a few pages in the first chapter of American-literature anthologies. In my mind her only claim to recognition was good timing. None of my English teachers had ever mentioned her, and the cursory introduction in my old college textbook was no help. The editor said she wrote in “laboring and tedious couplets.” Poor Bradstreet!

  But then one of those coincidences happened that change your life. The day before my first class, while I was on my daily run, I noticed a plaque mounted on a stone. It was partially obscured by a large bush, and this made it seem all the more mysterious. Curious, I trotted up the path and read, “Near this spot was the house of Simon Bradstreet, Governor of Massachusetts Bay, 1679-1686 and 1689-1692. His wife, Ann [sic], daughter of Governor Dudley, was the first American poetess. They lived in Ipswich, 1635-44.” Suddenly I wanted to know more about my long-dead neighbor. What was she doing in Ipswich? What was she doing in America in 1635? I had thought only the Pilgrims were here then.

  I raced home and studied her poems with sharpened attention. The next day in class I read aloud some of my favorite lines. About being a woman, from “The Prologue”: “I am obnoxious / to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits.” About loss, from “Upon the Burning of Our House”: “Here stood my trunk, and there that chest, / There lay that store I counted best. / My pleasant things in ashes lie.” About love, from “To My Dear and Loving Husband”: “If ever two were one, then surely we. / If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; / If ever wife was happy in a man, / Compare with me ye women if you can.” To my amazement, my students liked them. One even asked if we could spend more time on her.

  Years have passed since that discovery, and I have read Bradstreet with class after class of students. They have been thrilled by her passion and slang, her formality and humor; and because of their eagerness to know more about her, I soon found myself wondering why she had not been part of my own education in American literature. Nestled right next to her poems in her collected works, there is an astonishingly powerful autobiography, as well as religious meditations, and some reflections in prose. Anne articulates important ideas about what it means to be an American, a mother, and a person of faith during bleak and despairing times. Her writing is unabashedly honest and offers sudden brave glimpses into her struggles and her private ideas.

  At the very least she should have turned up as a prominent early-American woman pioneer. She sailed to New England in 1630 at age eighteen, hiked through the first-growth forests with pines as huge as California redwoods, bore eight children in the wilderness, and published the first book of poems from the New World. Yet when I looked her up in the library, few people had written about her. To date there have been only two biographies, the most recent of which was published in 1974, and only one book-length critical study. Lately, it seems, she has become a favorite of literary scholars, perhaps because the immediacy of her voice speaks to contemporary readers. But whatever the reason for this scholarly interest, in general, most people have barely heard of her. Was it really possible that such a likable poet, who lived life on such a magnificent scale, had been so neglected? After all, she had been a celebrity in her own lifetime and had left a substantial body of work, as much as any of our other major writers.

  I embarked on a pilgrimage to find Anne. I’ve read countless journals and letters from the time, as well as many books on topics such as seventeenth-century gardening, baking, shipping, economics, weaving, child rearing, courtship practices, theology, and legal codes. As a result, this book has become as much a quest for a lost country as it is for her.

  It is difficult to reconstruct the past. In fact, really, it is impossible. There is little physical evidence remaining. Even her house is gone, like most of the dwellings of the early settlers, burned, torn down, crumbled to ash. On their bones, our houses crowd together, huge, windowed, balconied. Cars roar by on the old paths, now paved. I live less than twenty miles from where Anne used to live, but often she feels as far away as the moon.

  But one December night I had one of those moments in which she felt close enough to touch. The snow was falling fast—more than a foot that afternoon, and more was piling up. The drifts were as high as the roof of my car. The wind was boiling in off the ocean, and the house shook with each gust of heavy air. This was a real storm, the kind that makes you glad you don’t live in one of the houses on the shore. The sea was gray and smoky, like a cauldron, breaking over the little stone walls of the summer houses.

  After supper my family’s lights flickered ominously and then went out. At first the darkness was like an unexpected intermission. We were not cold yet and wouldn’t be for several more hours. Simply, it was dark, dark, dark. We fumbled for flashlights, candles, matches, and once we had found these things, the muted tones of the house, the deep shadows, seemed romantic, as though we were having an extended candlelit dinner. But the wind continued to bang against the walls, the windows rattled, and the inconveniences began. There was no hot water to give my son his nightly bath, no light to read to him by. I couldn’t find his stuffed dog. Once he was tucked in, it was too dark to read my own book, and too cold and noi
sy. Before long my son was out of bed, crying. The wind would not stop and he could not go to sleep. “It’s too loud, Mommy,” he complained. “It’s cold.” And it was cold, unrelentingly so.

  I climbed into bed next to my son, and as we lay there shivering, I knew that this, of course, was how winter was for Anne, but worse. Her house had thinner walls. No foam insulation or storm windows, just panels of wood with clay daubed between the cracks. She and her husband were rich, so they could afford to light a few candles if they chose to, but still they had to use them sparingly. Largely they depended on messy, unreliable lamps fashioned out of pine resin and tar. Their fire would have gone out in such a storm unless they stayed up all night to tend it, and the house would have gotten colder and colder. If I found one night like this almost impossible to bear, how did she find the strength and inspiration not only to survive the wilderness but to stand firm in her faith, and to write? How did she not despair?

  THERE IS A JEWISH TRADITION of midrash, which is when the rabbis attempted “to fill in the gaps” of some of the more mystifying biblical stories, such as those of Job or Jonah and the whale, and in many ways that is what these pages have become. By retelling some of the history, the details, and the facts of her time, I have attempted to resurrect Anne and her home in early America. But I have also tried to piece together something more—what it felt like to be one of the first Europeans in America and what Anne, a gently bred, highly educated woman, might have thought, done, and experienced as she struggled through the ordeal of emigration and settling a new country. What was it like to live in a time before electric lights and high heels, before microwaves, blue jeans, and pollution, when the fastest thing around was a seagull or a galloping horse?

  Of course, Anne had no idea that she lived “before” anything in particular, any more than we think that the twenty-first century is a time “before.” To us it is always now, modern times. We are the latest thing. So thought Anne, once upon a time. She believed that she was the most modern of the moderns.

  Still, the limitations of what we can know, no matter how obsessed we are, have, inevitably, become clear to me. She walks ahead of me and I don’t get to see her face. Was her hair brown or pale? Was she slim? Did she get heavier as she bore her children? Or was she petite, like a bird? What did her voice sound like? Did she argue with her husband? Did she like to cook? Was she as ambitious as I think she was? Would she have approved of my writing about her? But the closer I have drawn, the more she has receded, her figure diminishing, no matter how I strain to catch up. Those shores of early America are irretrievable, as is Anne. I have tried to revive her here, but some of the most important things are bound to be left unknown.

  Slender in build,

  A narrow, almond-eyed shade,

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  she drifts up from the gaping gold,

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  to the crown of the Now.

  —PAUL CELAN, from “In Front of a Candle”

  Chapter One

  Arrival

  AFTER SEVENTY-SEVEN DAYS AT SEA, one Captain Milbourne steered his ship, the Arbella—packed with more than three hundred hungry, exhausted souls—into Salem Harbor, shooting off the ship’s cannon in elation. It was early in the morning of June 12, 1630, a date that would prove to be more fateful to America than the more-famous 1492, but if either the captain or his hapless passengers had expected any kind of fanfare from the New World itself, they were to be disappointed. Far from offering herself up for casual and easy delectation, America hunched like a dark animal, sleeping and black, offering no clues about her contours, let alone the miracles reported by the rumor mill of the 1620s: inland seas, dragons, Indians adorned in golden necklaces, fields sown with diamonds, and bears as tall as windmills.

  To the bedraggled individuals who clung to the rails of this huge flagship, once a battleship in the Mediterranean wars against Turkish pirates and now the first vessel of its kind to have successfully limped across the ocean from England, it must have seemed cruel that they would have to wait until dawn before they could glimpse this world that still swam just out of their reach. Most of the passengers, however, were pious individuals and bowed their heads in acquiescence to the Lord’s will. But the few rebellious souls, and there were some notable firebrands onboard the Arbella, could not help but find themselves feeling more discontented than ever.

  One in particular, a young woman of about eighteen years, could not subdue her resentment. She wished that the new land would never appear before her eyes, that she had never been ripped away from her beloved England, even that she had perished in the waters they had just crossed rather than face what would come next. Not that she admitted her fears to any of the other passengers pacing on the deck that morning. Anne Dudley Bradstreet was the daughter of Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, the second in command of the expedition, and was too acutely aware of her responsibilities to show her feelings of resentment.

  To her, though, it seemed an outrageous venture to have undertaken. To most English people, it was a foolhardy one as well. With the exception of the notorious Pilgrims, who had arrived in Cape Cod in 1620, whom Captain Milbourne and his passengers regarded as crazed radicals with admirable ideals but little common sense, few Englishmen and even fewer women had braved this terrible journey to Massachusetts. For the weary passengers onboard the Arbella, the greatest challenge they had to stare down was not starvation, storms, plague, whales, or even Indians. Instead it was the astonishing mystery they faced: Where were they going? What would it be like when they set foot on land? America had seemed as impossible as a fairy tale, and yet suddenly, in the next few hours, it was about to become miraculously real.

  It was difficult not to speculate. Maybe there would be wild vineyards laden with grapes. Maybe tigers would spring up out of the water. Maybe the settlers would die immediately of some New World fever or get eaten by giant creatures. Maybe, though, they had finally arrived in the land of milk and honey, which was what some of the preachers back home had hinted at. If England was a corrupt country, then America had every possibility of being a new chance, the promised land, a Canaan that offered not only respite but also fame, glory, and God’s approval.

  Anne remained unconvinced by such heady forecasts. But she had learned to hide her doubts from those who watched to see how the deputy governor’s eldest daughter behaved. Only many years later did she admit how resistant she had been to coming to America. When “I found a new world and new manners,” she wrote, “my heart rose,” meaning not that she rejoiced but that she retched.1 Certainly she had no idea of the fame that lay ahead for her. Indeed, only a seer, the kind of mystic that Anne would have dismissed as idly superstitious, or worse, as a sinister dabbler in witchcraft, could have prophesied that within twenty years this seemingly unremarkable young woman—intelligent and passionate as she may have been—would spearhead England’s most dramatic venture, the creation of a thriving colony in America, and assume her place as one of the significant people in the English-speaking world.

  BUT ALL OF THIS EXCITEMENT AND GOOD FORTUNE lay hidden in the future, while the present consisted of a frightening new continent swathed in darkness. Nor did things improve as the sun grew stronger. The shadows gave way to forest and a beach, and finally, the growing light revealed a rocky, uneven-looking land, remarkable more for what was missing than for what was present.

  Here there were no chimneys or steeples. No windmills, crenellated turrets, wheat fields, or cities. No orchards, hedgerows, cottages, or grazing sheep. No shops, carts, or roads to travel on. This was true emptiness. Anne had known this would be the case, but the shock was still overwhelming. Granted, there were also no bishops who hated them, and the merciless king who seemed intent on the destruction of Anne’s people was thousands of miles away. But for this eighteen-year-old and many of her fellow travelers, the thrill of escaping those foes had long since dissipated in the face of the “great waters” they had jus
t crossed. Now, staring at this hulking continent, it was clear to the faithful that only the hand of their God could protect them from the dangers ahead. The only other reassuring consideration was that here was plenty of land for the picking and enough timber for everyone to build a house and barn and keep warm all winter long—a refreshing difference from England, where wood was so scarce that stealing lumber was punishable by death.2

  Despite the uncertainty they faced after their long days at sea, most of the travelers were understandably eager to feel solid earth beneath their feet. Before they could disembark, however, Governor John Winthrop, Deputy Governor Dudley, and Anne’s husband, Simon Bradstreet, announced that a small group would go to inspect the settlement in Salem that had been, they hoped, successfully “planted” by the advance party they had sent the year before. This courageous band of men had been charged to clear land, erect homes, and plant crops to help support the Arbella’s passengers when they arrived. But Winthrop and Dudley had received only a few letters from these pioneers, and although they had been optimistic and full of good cheer, no word had been received for many months, triggering concerns that the little group had not survived the winter. Perhaps the new arrivals would find only a shattered village and the dismal remains of their comrades.

  No one could discern the settlement’s condition from the Arbella’s anchorage. The great ship had lowered its sails about a mile away from shore to avoid any mishaps with hidden rocks or shallow waters. As a result, they would have to row for nearly an hour to find out what had happened in Salem. Anne may have been one of the few to hope that she would not be on this first exploratory mission ashore. However, it soon became clear that her father expected her, her mother, and her three younger sisters to climb down into the tiny skiff that lay tossing up and down in the waves. None of them could swim. But in Anne’s world, a good daughter was, by definition, someone who obeyed her parents without question, and so she had little choice but to sweep her sisters along and guide them over the rails of the ship.