Mary Rowlandson

Mary Rowlandson (born c. 1637, Somerset, England—died January 5, 1710/11, Wethersfield, Connecticut [U.S.]) was a British American colonial author who wrote one of the first 17th-century captivity narratives, in which she told of her capture by Native Americans, revealing both elements of Native American life and of Puritan-Indian conflicts in early New England.

Mary White was taken to America by her parents when she was a child. They lived in Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (in what is now the U.S. state of Massachusetts) until 1653, when they moved to the new frontier village of Lancaster. In 1656 she married Joseph Rowlandson; he was ordained a Puritan minister in 1660, and he became Lancaster’s first regular minister. Events of the next 20 years of her life are obscure.

In February 1676, during King Philip’s War, a party of Indians attacked Lancaster and laid siege to the Rowlandson house, where many townspeople had sought refuge. The Indians overwhelmed the defenders and took 24 captives, including Mary Rowlandson and her three children, one of whom died a week later. Rowlandson was kept a prisoner for three months, during which time she was treated poorly. With her captors she traveled as far as the Connecticut River to the west and moved north into what is now New Hampshire. Her wounds slowly healed, and she became accustomed to her captors’ meagre diet. Her skill in sewing and knitting earned her rather better treatment than less fortunate captives. At one point in her ordeal she met “King Philip”—the Wampanoag sachem (chief), Metacom. A stolen Bible given her by one of the Indians was her only solace.

In May 1676 Rowlandson was at last ransomed back to her husband for £20. Her two surviving children were returned sometime later. The Reverend Rowlandson died in November 1678, and about that time Mary wrote an account of her captivity for her children. Her account was printed four times in 1682. The first printing, published in Boston, is known only from eight pages that were used as lining papers for another book. The second and third printings of 1682, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were followed by a fourth version, issued in London. A second edition—“Carefully Corrected, and Purged from abundance of Errors which escaped in the former Impression”—was published in Boston in 1720 with the title The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. The vividly written tale quickly became a classic example not only of the captivity genre but of colonial literature generally. It ran through more than 30 editions over the years, and selections from it have been included in countless anthologies of American literature.

Rowlandson was long believed to have died soon after her husband, but late 20th-century scholarship revealed that in 1679 she was married a second time, to a Captain Samuel Talcott (died 1691), who had been on the War Council during King Philip’s War. She lived as a widow for some 20 years after Talcott’s death.