The Author to Her Book Analysis

There’s nothing too crazy going on in this poem—metrically speaking, that is (we’ll leave it to you to determine if all that business about washing the dirty book-child’s face is a little n...

While we always warn you Shmoopers not to confuse the speaker with the poet him- or herself, we can say at least that we’re dealing with a female author. That’s who the speaker of this poem is,...

The speaker of this poem doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on by way of setting. All those references to revising her work and trying to fix it, however, make us think that she is in her house so...

If anything, this is a poem about frustration, disappointment, and irritation. It is about an “author” who is annoyed that her friends took her book to get published without her consent, and it...

“The Author, to Her Book”—in short, the title of this poem tells us that what we are reading is what the author said to her book, or rather is what the author feels towards her book. Yes, the...

Anne Bradstreet and her husband had eight children. Now that’s a lot of kids, for sure. Since motherhood was such a big part of her life, Bradstreet wrote a lot about it. That makes sense, right?...

For the most part, “The Author to Her Book” is a pretty pleasant, easy-going little cruise. However, sometimes Bradstreet's sentences have a funky kind of order that can be tricky. Just take a...

Know any writers whose houses burned down? Well now you do. The Bradstreet house burned down, leaving Anne and her family homeless and possession-less. Bradstreet eventually wrote a poem about it t...

We hate to say it, but there’s no sex in this poem. In fact, the speaker basically says she had a child without having sex at all (the book has no “father”). Well that’s kind of boring, isn...