(b. ca. 1637; d. 1710 or 1711) Author of a captivity narrative, the first book in English published by a woman in North America.

Mary White Rowlandson was born in England and moved with her family to the Salem, Massachusetts, area, where she married Joseph Rowlandson, a minister in Lancaster. They had three children. Lancaster, about fifty miles west of Boston, was a small British frontier community of approximately fifty families on the edge of what was the new English settlement and a number of Native American communities. On February 10, 1675, Native men attacked Lancaster. Mary Rowlandson and her children were among those captured. Her youngest daughter was killed. This was not merely an assault on a small population, but rather an event that marked the beginning of what became called King Philip's War.

Rowlandson was the first woman of British North America to publish a prose document in the...