The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright Paperback / softback

by Ann M. Little

Part of the The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

An eye-opening biography of a woman whose life intersected with three distinct cultures in eighteenth-century America: colonial New England, French Canadian, and Native Americanâ€œEsther Wheelwrightâ€™s journeyâ€”from Puritan girl, to Wabanaki captive, to mother superior ofÂ the largest Catholic convent in French Canadaâ€”is one of the most fascinating personal stories in the annals of what we call â€˜colonial history.â€™ Deeply researched, and wonderfully contextualized . . .Â [this book] opens a wide window on three major cultural venues, whose interplay defined and shaped a whole era.â€â€”John Demos, author of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696â€“1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven.

Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in the tribe.

At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the orderâ€™s only foreign-born mother superior.

Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwrightâ€™s life was exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural.

This meticulously researched book discovers her life through the communities of girls and women around her: the free and enslaved women who raised her in Wells, Maine; the Wabanaki women who cared for her, catechized her, and taught her to work as an Indian girl; the French-Canadian and Native girls who were her classmates in the Ursuline school; and the Ursuline nuns who led her to a religious life.