Anne Yale Hopkins comes to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1638, delighted to have escaped the household of her stepfather Theophilus Eaton, a rigorous Puritan, by marrying Edward, who becomes governor of Hartford. She can hardly wait to make a fresh start in a new land. She is a voracious reader, and writes several books, recording her impressions of life in the New world. Her first enthusiastic impressions of the community gradually change, however, as she comes up against the rigidity and judgmentalism of some of the Puritans. She learns to refrain from expressing thoughts she knows would be deemed unacceptable and retreats into silence. With the death of one good Hartford friend, and the departure of the other, she withdraws even more. Edward’s friends advise taking away her books and paper — they say her brain is overloaded, and that is why she is behaving so oddly. Anne is devastated, hides her journal but keeps writing, while certain flashes of a lost memory prompt her to face a new reality.
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“This elegant novel recounts the passage of a sensitive and gifted woman of the seventeeth century from Puritan England to Connecticut. Anne McPherson narrates her struggle for identity with a fine ear for the dilemmas of creative women past and present. This is a worthy reconstruction of the life of a woman of worth.”
—Margaret Cannon
“This strikes me as something new. Distant glints of bushes and crucibles, Moodie and Miller, but it’s utterly not a spin-off from anything you’ve met before; it’s the insecure, truth-hunting voice of a young Englishwoman in 17th-century Connecticut struggling with racial/marital taboos and the beyond-ugly face of institutionalized Puritanism. Anne Hoskins, narrating her story, is unpretentious, never built up past her rightful dimensions, and finally is as fresh and (see above) new as can be.”
—Don Coles
“In The Hedge, Anne McPherson wraps us authentically in the social fabric and the sensory historical detail of her seventeenth-century protagonist — all the while prizing twenty-first century insights from her predicaments. Rooted in one woman’s truth, this is a compelling and inspiring read.”
—maura hanrahan