♀Anne Dudley

Anne Dudley (about 1612 – 16 September 1672) was the Massachusetts poet Anne Bradstreet, whose poems were printed in London in 1650 and are generally counted as the first volume of poetry by a writer living in the English colonies of North America. She was the sister of Samuel Dudley (1608–1683), the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), and a daughter of Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Early life

Her grandfather Edmond Yorke of Cotton End, Northampton, named her in his will of 18 November 1614, printed in 1893 from the Northampton wills. He left “Anne Dudley” twenty shillings and a silver spoon, to be delivered when she reached the age of twenty-one, and left her brother Samuel and a cousin, Abigail Greene, forty shillings and a spoon each. The will gives no birth date. A family history published in 1886 and a genealogical dictionary of 1861 both place her birth about 1612, in England, and make her the eldest daughter of Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke, with a brother Samuel and sisters Patience, Sarah and Mercy.

Marriage and later life

Both books say she married Simon Bradstreet^W, who became governor of Massachusetts in his own right, and the 1886 history puts the marriage about 1628, in England. The dictionary says she married him before the family left England; the family came over in 1630. The family history says she and Simon had eight children. It describes her as a popular poetess of her time, and the dictionary calls her “a lady of literary powers”. The history says she dedicated a volume of poems to her father in 1642 and wrote an epitaph for her mother, who was buried at Roxbury in December 1643, and it prints both. Thomas Dudley’s will, as printed in the same book, left a sixth part of mill lands and debts at Watertown to the children of “my daughter, Bradstreet”, with equal shares for any born after the will was made.

Both books give her death on 16 September 1672; the family history places it at Andover, Massachusetts.