Book of Awesome Women Writers. Becca Anderson
writing was dangerous. In 1645, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop lamented the sad straying of “a godly young woman” who was mentally unstable and who in a weakened, fallen state, gave “herself wholly to reading and writing, and [had] written many books.” He had banished Anne Hutchinson seven years earlier for daring to interpret religious doctrine in her own way.
But Anne Bradstreet’s brother-in-law John Woodbridge didn’t hold to the belief that women couldn’t have their own intellectual lives. He had Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, collected in The Tenth Muse, printed in London, where it had proved to be highly “vendable,” according to London booksellers. Woodbridge provided a foreword to the book making clear that it was “the work of a woman, honoured and esteemed where she lives, for…the exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and these poems are but the fruit of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.”
A devoted mother, Anne Bradstreet gave birth to eight children, and in her role as helpmate, she saw her husband rise to considerable prosperity and power in the colony. With little time to rest or write, her literary output ceased. She suffered from continuing symptoms of the smallpox she had contracted as a child and died in 1673.
Though she was forgotten for centuries, twentieth-century poets, particularly Conrad Aiken and John Berryman, have recognized her contribution in various tributes. Adrienne Rich demands her genius be honored: “To have written…the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children on the edge of the wilderness, was to have managed a poet’s range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.”
Fool, I do grudge the Muses did not part
Twixt him and me that overfluent store….
From the Prologue, Anne Bradstreet
MARY MANLEY the first bestselling woman author
It is amazing that Mary Manley is not better known; she was the first British woman to have a career as a political journalist, the first female author of a bestseller, and the very first woman to be jailed for her writing. Born in 1663, she was ahead of her time in her advocacy for women’s rights and her willingness to take risks with her own comfortable life to fight for these rights. Manley decried the inequity that saw women punished for acts any man could freely engage in. Her greatest passion was that women should as writers have equal opportunity with men.
She herself was prolific, authoring short stories, plays, satires, political essays, and letters. She replaced Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame as the editor of the Tory paper, the Examiner, yet she remains relatively unknown, while he has a permanent place in the canon and is widely read and widely taught. Swift’s achievements seem Lilliputian in comparison to Mary Manley’s feat.
Her bestselling satire, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes from the New Atlantis, an Island in the Mediterranean, was aimed at the opposition to the Tory party, the Whigs. The poison prose swiftly hit its target. Manley and her publishers were thrown in jail, and the adage about any kind of publicity—even bad publicity—being good held true. Readers bought the book in droves to figure out who the real people were behind the thinly veiled biographical sketches. Clever lass that she was, Manley’s absolutely public Secret Memoirs included much to titillate and tantalize, including Corinna, the maiden who staunchly refuses to get married, and a mysterious lesbian group called the Cabal.
As a challenge at the height of her fame, Mary Manley described herself as “a ruined woman,” and in a fictionalized autobiography revealed her betrayal and entrapment into marriage to a cousin who took her money and ran. Inspired by her father, a writer who held a high office, Mary wasn’t ruined at all, but was a huge success as a writer who chose lovers of standing as peers and lived life on her own terms. Before there was J.K., Danielle, or Nora, there was Mary! This seventeenth-century virago paved the way for Joe Klein’s bestselling political satire, Primary Colors, and for every female who ever mounted the bestseller list.
She who has all the muses in her head, wanted to be caressed in a poetical manner.
Mary Manley from Secret Memoirs
LUCY TERRY PRINCE pioneer and poet
As one of the first Black American poets, Lucy Terry has yet to receive her due. She was born in 1730 in Africa. After being kidnapped as a baby, she was brought to the colony of Rhode Island by slavers and was purchased at the age of five by Ensign Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts, to be a servant. Wells had Lucy baptized on June 15, 1735, at the insistence of his mistress, during the “Great Awakening,” an effort to root Calvinism in New England. As many Black people in America as possible were baptized in this mass conversion effort.
Little is known of her life until age sixteen, when she was inspired to poetry by the bloody massacre of two colonial families by sixty Indians in “the Bars”—a colonial word for “meadow”—an area outside Deerfield. George Sheldon, a Deerfield historian, declared Lucy’s ballad, “The Bars Fight,” to be “the first rhymed narration of an American slave” and believes it was recited and sung by Lucy. He further describes it as “the fullest contemporary account of that bloody tragedy which has been preserved.” While the original document has been lost, it was passed down in the oral tradition and printed for the first time by Josiah Gilbert Holland in 1855.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY the muse of Africa
While Lucy Terry Prince remains fairly obscure, Phillis Wheatley has been acknowledged for her role as one of the earliest women writers in America. She is, in fact, generally regarded as the first Black woman writer, and, after Anne Bradstreet, the second woman writer in America. A poet, her verse expresses guarded pride about her “sable race” and includes a subtle treatment of the subject of slavery, though her letters expressed her strong feelings about it. She called herself “Africa’s Muse” in her Hymn to Humanity.
Her story and Lucy’s began the same way: Phillis was kidnapped by slave traders in Africa as a child, and, along with as many as eighty other young girls, she was transported by ship from Senegal, brought to the port of Boston, and sold into slavery in 1761.
Phillis’ fortunes were a bit better than those of many others as she was purchased by a kind-hearted woman, Susannah Wheatley, who took pity on the forlorn child wrapped in a dirty scrap of carpeting. Phillis’s price was a bargain; the Wheatleys, guessing her to be around seven years old because of missing front teeth, took her into their home on King Street and gave her their last name, as was the practice with slaves.
The Wheatleys noticed how curious and alert Phillis was and judged her to be of exceptional intelligence. When she tried to write on the wall, their teenaged daughter, Mary Wheatley, started to teach Phillis in earnest. At the end of a year’s time, Phillis was reading and writing with ease and had also learned, according to her master’s recollection, a “little astronomy, some ancient and modern geography, a little ancient history, a fair knowledge of the Bible, and a thoroughly appreciative acquaintance with the most important Latin classics, especially the works of Virgil and Ovid.” Phillis became, again in his words, “one of the most highly educated young women in Boston,” and went on to study and translate Latin. Indeed, one of her interpretations of a Latin tale by Ovid was published.
She also liked to compose verse and loved the brilliantly crafted poetry of Alexander Pope, whom she took as her model. In 1767, fourteen-year-old Phillis wrote the first of many occasional poems, “To the University of Cambridge,” thirty-two blank verses of counsel for college boys. The Wheatleys proved to be generous to the girl and encouraged her to pursue her poetics, providing her with paper and pen in case of sudden inspiration. Phillis had a delicate constitution and was only allowed to perform light chores such as dusting and polishing.
One of her occasional poems, “On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield,” brought her to the eyes of the world when it appeared on a broadside printed in Boston in 1770, which was then reprinted throughout the colonies and in England. Her story was sensationalized as the work of “a servant girl…but nine years in this country from Africa.” She was ushered into literary and social circles she would normally have been forbidden to enter, though because of