Mary Rowlandson

Mary Rowlandson, ne White, later Mary Talcott was a colonial American woman who was captured by Native Americans during King Philips War and held forweeks before being ransomed. In 1682, six years after her ordeal, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson was published. This text is considered a seminal American work in the literary genre of captivity narratives. It went through four printings in 1682 and garnered readership both in the New England colonies and in England, leading it to be considered by some the first American bestseller.

Mary White was born c. 1637 in Somerset, England. The family left England sometime before 1650, settled at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and moved in 1653 to Lancaster, on the Massachusetts frontier. There, she married Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, the son of Thomas Rowlandson of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1656. Four children were born to the couple between 1658 and 1669, with their first daughter dying young.

Source: Wikipedia