Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World Poet. Her volume of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America ... received considerable favorable attention when it was first published in London in 1650. Eight years after it appeared it was listed by William London in his Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England, and George III is reported to have had the volume in his library. Bradstreet's work has endured, and she is still considered to be one of the most important early American poets.

Although Anne Dudley Bradstreet did not attend school, she received an excellent education from her father, who was widely read-- Cotton Mather described Thomas Dudley as a "devourer of books"--and from her extensive reading in the well-stocked library of the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, where she lived while her father was steward from...