Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637–1711) was a British American colonial woman and Puritan minister’s wife who was captured in a Native American raid on the frontier town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1676 during King Philip’s War. She was held for eleven weeks and five days before she was ransomed and reunited with her husband in Boston. Six years after her captivity and release, Rowlandson’s account of the event was published in England and America. Rowlandson’s captivity narrative quickly became a bestseller, and more than thirty editions were published by the end of the nineteenth century, leading to her recognition as one of the most well-known female writers of the seventeenth century and the author of the first archetypal Native American captivity narrative.