The Author to Her Book

The mother in the poem is the poet herself. This mother is so conscientious that she “wash’d” (Line 13), attempted to “blemishes amend” (Line 12), and clothed the child in what cloth is at hand, “home-spun” (Line 18). These activities are nurturing, just what one would expect of a diligent but “poor” (Line 23) mother who is doing her best in the absence of a father for her child. In choosing to represent the poet as mother, Anne Bradstreet is implicitly urging the reader to see writing as a feminine activity.

The representation of the mother as trying but failing may be a nod to negative assumptions about the intellect and creativity of women. On the other hand, using the mother as a symbol of the struggling writer is a rhetorical strategy used by many of Bradstreet's contemporaries, describing their work as humble and flawed when it is in reality an example of artistic excellence in an exercise of conventional humility. The polished nature of “The Author to Her Book” represents the poet as a mother who is in fact skilled in her creation of poetry.

If “The Author to Her Book” is a biographical poem, then the child is a symbol for The Tenth Muse, the 1650 volume of poetry that made Bradstreet the first Englishwoman in North America to be credited with publication. Bradstreet’s description of the child thus reinforces the importance of the writer’s critical revision of creative work, something lacking in this poetic child.

In the poem, the speaker describes the child as imperfect, poorly dressed, and lacking a father. This last qualification carries two meanings. On the one hand, the book's fatherlessness constitutes illegitimacy, marking it and its mother as social pariahs; this reading continues Bradstreet's self-deprecating approach, downplaying the book released ostensibly without her cooperation. On the other hand, by drawing attention to the fact that her work has no male parent, Bradstreet is pointedly asserting that a woman is its sole author—neither her brother-in-law John Woodbridge, nor the publisher, nor any other prominent male figure with whom Bradstreet was associated can or should take credit for her work.