The voyage on the "Arbella" with John Winthrop took three months and was quite difficult, with several people dying from the experience. Life was rough and cold, quite a change from the beautiful estate with its well-stocked library where Anne spent many hours. As Anne tells her children in her memoirs, "I found a new world and new manners at which my heart rose [up in protest.]"a. However, she did decide to join the church at Boston. As White writes, "instead of looking outward and writing her observations on this unfamiliar scene with its rough and fearsome aspects, she let her homesick imagination turn inward, marshalled the images from her store of learning and dressed them in careful homespun garments." 

Historically, Anne's identity is primarily linked to her prominent father and husband, both governors of Massachusetts who left portraits and numerous records. Though she appreciated their love and protection, "any woman who sought to use her wit, charm, or intelligence in the community at large found herself ridiculed, banished, or executed by the Colony's powerful group of male leaders."Her domain was to be domestic, separated from the linked affairs of church and state, even "deriving her ideas of God from the contemplations of her husband's excellencies," according to one document. 

This situation was surely made painfully clear to her in the fate of her friend Anne Hutchinson, also intelligent, educated, of a prosperous family and deeply religious. The mother of 14 children and a dynamic speaker, Hutchinson held prayer meetings where women debated religious and ethical ideas. Her belief that the Holy Spirit dwells within a justified person and so is not based on the good works necessary for admission to the church was considered heretical; she was labelled a Jezebel and banished, eventually slain in an Indian attack in New York. No wonder Bradstreet was not anxious to publish her poetry and especially kept her more personal works private. 

Bradstreet wrote epitaphs for both her mother and father which not only show her love for them but shows them as models of male and female behavior in the Puritan culture. 

An Epitaph on my dear and ever honoured mother, Mrs. Dorothy Dudley, Who deceased December 27, 1643, and of her age, 61 

Here lies/ A worthy matron of unspotted life,/ A loving mother and obedient wife,/ A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,/ Whom oft she fed, and clothed with her store;/ To servants wisely aweful, but yet kind,/ And as they did, so they reward did find:/ A true instructor of her family,/ The which she ordered with dexterity,/ The public meetings ever did frequent,/ And in her closest constant hours she spent;/ Religious in all her words and ways,/ Preparing still for death, till end of days:/ Of all her children, children lived to see,/ Then dying, left a blessed memory. 

Compare this with the epitaph she wrote for her father: 

Within this tomb a patriot lies/ That was both pious, just and wise,/ To truth a shield, to right a wall,/ To sectaries a whip and maul,/ A magazine of history,/ A prizer of good company/ In manners pleasant and severe/ The good him loved, the bad did fear,/ And when his time with years was spent/ In some rejoiced, more did lament./ 1653, age 77 

Anne seems to have written poetry primarily for herself, her family, and her friends, many of whom were very well educated. Her early, more imitative poetry, taken to England by her brother-in-law (possibly without her permission), appeared as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America in 1650 when she was 38 and sold well in England. Her later works, not published in her lifetime although shared with friends and family, were more private and personal--and far more original-- than those published in The Tenth Muse. Her love poetry, of course, falls in this group which in style and subject matter was unique for her time, strikingly different from the poetry written by male contemporaries, even those in Massachusetts such as Edward Taylor and Michael Wigglesworth. 

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. She could be humorous with her "feminist" views, as in a poem on Queen Elizabeth I: 

Now say, have women worth, or have they none
Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone? 
Nay, masculines, you have taxed us long; 
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. 
Let such as say our sex is void of reason, 
Know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason.

Although few other American women were to publish poetry for the next 200 years, her poetry was generally ignored until "rediscovered" by feminists in the 20th century. These critics have found many significant artistic qualities in her work. 

"To My Dear and Loving Husband," "A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment"  and "The Prologue"and "The Author to Her Book"(with study materials) 
Selected Poems by Bradstreet (University of Toronto) 

Related Web sites: 

Context of Puritanism, from Paul Reuben's Perspectives on American Literature--A Research and Reference Guide
"Puritan Woman, A Tribute to Anne Bradstreet," poem written by Rose Shade
Bibliography of Criticism about Bradstreet