Poems by the First American Woman Author
Several Poems Compiled with great Variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight ... By a Gentlewoman in New-England. The Third Edition, corrected by the Author, and enlarged by an Addition of several other Poems found amongst her Papers after her Death.
[Newport, Rhode Island?]: Re-printed from the second Edition [by Anne Smith Franklin and James Franklin, Jr.?], 1758.
Second American edition, and the earliest obtainable one. xiii, [1 blank], 233, [1 blank] pp. Ornamental head- and tail-pieces. 1 vols. 12mo. Poems by the First American Woman Author. Modern antique calf, red morocco lettering piece. Trimmed a bit close but without significant losses. Provenance: Samuel Buell (signature on title dated 1773); Polly Buell (signature on original endpaper, now tipped in) Evans 8091; ESTC W22243; Sabin 7298; Wegelin 30; Stoddard and Whitesell 116. Item #338667
Although this edition is traditionally ascribed by Evans and others to have been printed in Boston, Stoddard and Whitesell suggest Newport, Rhode Island, printed by Anne Smith Franklin or James Franklin Jr., based on identification of the printer's ornaments. Bradstreet's poems were first published in London in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse (without her knowledge or consent), with a greatly expanded first American edition appearing in Boston in 1678 published by John Foster. Both of those editions are prohibitively rare. The present third edition reprints the expanded 1678 first American edition, with the errors noted on the errata of the former corrected. Rosenbach, offering an example of this edition in 1917 for $135, writes: "This Boston issue is just as rare as the London edition of 1650!"
Born in England, Anne Bradstreet was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, a colonial magistrate who served several terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1628, she married Simon Bradstreet, who afterward became governor of the same colony, and the couple arrived in America in 1630, settling initially in Cambridge but by 1644 in North Andover. Her first collection of poems was published in London in 1650 without her knowledge, and for the most part comprised of her early work accomplished while still in England. In 1678, six years after her death, a new edition of her poems was published in Boston. "[That edition] contained her revisions of her earlier poems, and the greater part of her mature work. These later poems show that she had no only learned to see nature and human life directly, but also to look into her own heart and write with the imaginative vision of a poet. The long poem 'Contemplation' is more than external description. The New England landscape, which invites her meditation, has grown familiar enough to be quietly possessed ... Her personal poems ... throw light on the Puritan view of life, as it looked to one born to it. It is a view without harshness, the view of one strong in mind, devout of heart, one to whom the beauty of holiness is beauty indeed. In the slender sheaf of Anne Bradstreet's best work there is a quality which marks her as a poet for whom her sex and the date 1650 are only incidental" (Ola Elizabeth Winslow, entry for Bradstreet in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary).
A "cornerstone of New England Belles Lettres" (Stoddard) by New England's first poet and America's first female author.
Price: $75,000.00 Free International Delivery
