Mary Rowlandson at her door, the woodcut of the Boston edition, 1773

The title page of John Boyle’s Boston edition, “A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes, of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Who was taken Prisoner by the Indians with several others,” printed “next door to the Three Doves in Marlborough-Street” in 1773. Its woodcut shows a woman in a cap at the door of a clapboard house, levelling a musket at four men coming on with hatchets and guns. It is the printer’s picture, not hers: in her own account the house was set on fire over them, and she was wounded and taken as she came out with her children. Printed three times at Boston in the early 1770s, the book made her story one of the best known in New England. Mary Rowlandson was very probably the aunt by marriage of Martha (Rowlandson) Ellinwood, whose brother Thomas was killed in the same attack on Lancaster on 10 February 1675/6. A strip along the foot of the image carries the library’s credit line.