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). The poems included in the collection are ones he “found that divers had gotten some scattered papers, affected them wel, were likely to have sent forth broken peices to the Authors prejudice, which I thought to prevent.” Woodbridge claims that publishing The Tenth Muse was an effort to protect Bradstreet’s literary reputation by producing an authoritative edition of her work.

Literary critics debate whether Bradstreet was truly unaware of Woodbridge’s edition. Nevertheless, the speaker of “The Author to Her Book” describes how painful it is to have work before a wide audience—“Vulgars” (Line 19)—who may know little of her and who are outside of her circle of peers. Her poem can thus be read as being about the anxieties of an author who has lost control over how her poems circulate. With the growing print culture of North America during this period, many writers likely experienced the same pangs.