The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright

The publisher describes the book as follows: ""Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) 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 [in Quebec City], where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order's only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright'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." The author describes Wheelwright's relations with British military and colonial authorities in the years after the conquest of New France, and with Frances Brooke, the wife of the British garrison's chaplain, whose novel, "The History of Emily Montague" (1769), describes Wheelwright and the Quebec Ursuline convent.

New Haven, CT

Yale University Press

2016

xvi-286p.

en

978-0-300-21821-3