The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)

About this book

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 American Esther Wheelwrights journeyfrom Puritan girl to Wabanaki captive to mother superior of the largest Catholic convent in French Canadais one of the most fascinating personal stories in the annals of what we call colonial history. Deeply researched and wonderfully contextualized . . . this book opens a wide window on three major cultural venues whose interplay defined and shaped a whole era.John Demos author of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America Born and raised in a New England garrison town Esther Wheelwright (16961780) 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 orders only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America Wheelwrights 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.