Anne’s biblically saturated mind is ubiquitous in her writing, as is her longing for her children’s salvation and maturity in Christ. As Anne appeared to deal with frequent illness, seeking God’s face in suffering is a constant refrain in the letter and in many of her poems. It’s not that Anne assumes every sickness or affliction corresponds to some clear cause, sinful or otherwise, in her life. Rather, any and every affliction provides an opportunity for her to seek the Lord anew.
Anne Bradstreet, one of the earliest American colonists, was both the daughter and wife of Massachusetts governors, and she became the mother of eight children. Her poems reveal a well-educated woman who avidly observed the natural world, delighted in her husband and children, and above all gloried in Christ. Her poems were first published in England in 1650, in a volume titled The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Often, she wrote in order to deal with the anxiety of her husband’s frequent travels back to England, to cope with family tragedy ( as in “Upon the Burning of Our House”), and especially in order to consider God’s mercies. The latter, in fact, could be considered the overarching theme of Anne’s work—both in poems and in other writings—and the one she was most eager to commend to future generations.
A letter survives which Anne wrote to her children in hopes of conveying something about her life—not primarily a biography, but a relation of God’s dealings with her soul—in the event that she couldn’t speak to them on her deathbed. She begins the account from age 6 or 7, at which age she remembers first developing a consciousness of sin. As Anne grew up, she learned to seek God in the midst of hardships she experienced. For example, around age 16, she fell deathly ill with smallpox, and in this affliction she “besought the Lord and confessed my pride and vanity, and He […] again restored me.” Not long after this, Anne married, moved to the American colonies in 1630, and joined the church at Boston. In one of the most touching points of her narrative, she writes that “It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great grief to me.”