One of the greatest poets of the 17th century, Anne Bradstreet was born in Northamptonshire, England, ca. 1612-13, daughter to Thomas Dudley, a clerk, and Dorothy Yorke. By 1619 Dudley became steward to the earl of Lincolnshire at Sempringham, and three years later acquired Anne's future husband, Simon Bradstreet, as an assistant, freshly graduated from Cambridge University. After a short separation when the Dudleys and Bradstreet left the earl's service for different positions, Anne and Simon married in 1628 and lived in the household of the countess of Warwick until they emigrated--with the Dudleys--on a ship named the Arbella to America. Anne was only 18 years old but had benefited from a good education in the noble households in which she had stayed. She was a firm puritan in religion. After short stays in Salem, Charlestown, and Newtown (now Cambridge), they all settled in Ipswich. Here she had eight children in an exceptionally happy marriage and wrote many of the poems that were eventually published in The Tenth Muse (London: Stephen Bowtell, 1650) after her brother-in-law surreptitiously took her manuscript back with him to England and had it printed without her knowledge. The Bradstreets moved in Andover, Mass., in the mid-1640s and Anne lived until her death in 1672. Six years after her death a second edition of her poems appeared, Several Poems (Boston: John Foster, 1678), described as "Corrected by the Author, and enlarged by an Addition of several other Poems found amongst her Papers after her Death." It is unclear whether the corrections in the 1678 edition truly belong to Anne. For that reason, the texts of all poems in this edition, where possible, come from the first edition. Josephine K. Piercy wrote an introduction to a facsimile reproduction of this book: The Tenth Muse (1650), and, from the Manuscripts, Meditations Divine and Morall Together with Letters and Occasional Pieces (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965; PS 711 A1 1965 ROBA). Of special interest is the facsimile of the so-called Andover Manuscript Book, now deposited in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Poems not found in this facsimile edition come from the 1678 edition. All texts are here normalized in spelling and punctuation but retain the capitalization and italicizing of the original. The standard scholarly edition is The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Allan P. Robb (Boston: Twayne, 1981; PS 711 A1 1981 ROBA). A good biography is Elizabeth Wade White's Anne Bradstreet: "The Tenth Muse" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; PS 712 W54 ROBA). The picture of Anne Bradstreet comes from a painted glass window in St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire.