Anne Bradstreet

This is the most recent book I have read, and one which we are promoting on an offer price of just £6.00 (RRP £7.99) until the end of this week! (03/07/10)

You can just sense the empathy Faith Cook has with the subject of this her latest biography, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). Anne was a woman of literary talent, along with a sense of family and public duty. There are questions as to the boundaries of a Christian woman’s role even today, but this is nothing compared to the received opinion in the 1600s. A Bunyan might be allowed to write a classic, but not a Bradstreet. They were both persecuted nonconformists, whose suffering sharpened their quills, but his work was readily published whilst hers only reached the press via a series of acts of providence. Nonetheless she has the remarkable distinction of being America’s first published poet of either sex! Quite amazing! Anne is regarded as American, because she left England with her family at just 18 years old in search of freedom – part of a mass migration of Puritans. In the tough New World she reflected the ethos of a culture already beginning to diverge from the mother country in hundreds of lines of rhyming couplets. But above all, her faith shines out through her verse. Fear, danger and death were never far away in the New England colonies, and all were sanctified to Anne. She viewed her life as a pilgrimage to glory. Beware, this book will cause some serious heart-searching. Take this sample:

Why should I live but to thy praise?
My life is hid with thee.

O Lord, no longer be my days
Than I may fruitful be.

Jeremy