Mary White Rowlandson holds a secure if modest place in Colonial American literary history as the author of the first and deservedly best-known New England Indian captivity narrative and, except for sixteenth-century Spanish accounts, the first account of captivity published in North America: The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson ... (1682). While the popularity of her narrative has carried it through some thirty editions since its first publication, little is known of her life beyond the facts contained in her account.

The wife of the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, pastor of the Puritan church at Lancaster, Massachusetts, Mary Rowlandson was captured during King Philip's War by a Wampanoag war party at the 20 February 1676 attack on Lancaster and was ransomed and freed at Princeton, Massachusetts, on 2 May of the same year. Her ordeal...