The Author to Her Book

One of the complaints the speaker makes in “The Author to Her Book” is that her friends “expos’d to publick view” (Line 4) her ill-crafted work, leaving the book to circulate “'mongst the Vulgars” (Line 19). These lines refer to the publication history of Anne Bradstreet’s earlier work.

Bradstreet likely kept up a steady correspondence with members of her social class, family, and people who shared her intellectual interests. During her life, it would have been commonplace for friends and intellectual peers to share their work in letters or via a few handmade copies. This form of private publication would have allowed Bradstreet to exercise a great deal of control over the original audience of her work. What happened to those poems after she sent them out into the world was another matter.

In the preface to The Tenth Muse, the editor (likely her brother-in-law John Woodbridge) explains that he fears angering no one but the author, “without whose knowledge, and contrary to her expectation, I have presumed to bring to publick view what she resolved should never in such a manner see the Sun” (Woodbridge, John. Preface. The Tenth Muse by Anne Bradstreet, 1650).