SOURCE: “Mary White Rowlandson Remembers Captivity: A Mother's Anguish, a Woman's Voice,” in Women's Life-Writing: Finding Voice/Building Community, edited by Linda S. Coleman, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997, pp. 109-18.

In the following essay, Boswell focuses on how Rowlandson defined herself by her sex and how her Narrative shows special concern for mothers and children.

With troubled heart and trembling hand I write, The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight 

—Anne Bradstreet

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

—Amy Hempel

Mary White Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, written sometime after her release from captivity in 1676 and published in 1682, was a bestseller during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...