Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire,
England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at
the age of 16. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents,
emigrated to America with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in
Ipswich, Massachusetts. There Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children,
and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American
colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that
would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her
knowledge, and published in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung
Up in America.
