The First Woman

Quick Facts

• Role: Original settler and first builder of the homestead in the north woods; catalyst for the house’s long history
• First appearance: Chapter 1-2 Summary; her Christian name is later revealed in the “Nightmaids” Letter
• Life in two acts: Young Puritan fugitive who builds a cabin with her lover; decades later, a reclusive elder who shelters and challenges a captive
• Key relationships: her first lover; a second husband (a Praying Indian); and The Anonymous Captive
• Emblematic objects: the cabin’s hearthstone, a silver ring, bone-and-iron charms, “nightmaids” mushrooms

Who They Are

Bold and boundary-crossing, the first settler of the valley is both homemaker and heretic: a woman who runs from Puritan order into a self-fashioned life in the woods. Her story unfolds first in youthful flight and ecstatic making, then in a flinty old age defined by protection, pragmatism, and morally thorny choices. As the origin point of the house, she embodies the book’s vision of The Interconnectedness of Nature and Human History: her acts leave traces in stone, soil, and blood that echo through generations.

Personality & Traits

Her defining quality is a fierce self-authorship—she writes a life in the wilderness that refuses the either/or of colony vs. forest. The novel shows her spirit more than her face: a kinetic, adaptive presence whose care is real but unsentimental, and whose ethics are situational but never casual.

• Rebellious, joyous defiance: She flees an arranged marriage to a “cruel minister,” running with a lover into the woods; the narrative frames this as liberation, an entry into a new “Realm.”
• Resilient, skill-hardened: After her lover’s death, she survives alone, later marries a Praying Indian, and learns trapping, fishing, foraging—crafts that turn exile into endurance.
• Liminal identity, consciously performed: The captive sees “skirts and blankets like an Indian” but an English face; the woman removes her bone-and-iron charms when English scouts arrive, signaling an alert, strategic self-presentation.
• Pragmatic to the bone: To a grieving plea—“Will you not comfort me?”—she answers, “I do not have the comfort which you seek,” a refusal that reads as honesty rather than cruelty.
• Morally complex guardian: She saves a mother and infant yet poisons English scouts with “nightmaids” to stop a larger massacre, accepting violence to prevent worse violence.
• Stern nurturance: She brews broth, forces the baby to the breast when the mother is delirious, and then demands labor: “Will you just drink my broth?”—care tied to contribution.

Character Journey

Her arc moves from ecstatic escape to deliberate stewardship. As a young woman, she and her lover carve a clearing from wilderness, lay the hearth’s “wide, flat stone,” and inaugurate a place where human time will root. Loss toughens her. The death of one husband and a later marriage across cultures detach her from any single allegiance; she becomes an outsider to both worlds but a sovereign within her valley. In old age, she turns that sovereignty into protection, saving a captive and her child and, finally, choosing preventative violence to stop impending slaughter. Her burial on the land seals her belonging and transforms the homestead into a site of contested refuge, aligning her with the theme of Sanctuary and Escape.

Key Relationships

• Her first lover: Wild, “mad,” and tuned to nature’s spirits, he matches her rebellious pulse. Together they perform the primal act of settlement—felling trees, stacking stones—and his presence frames the woods not as exile but as possibility. His death is the hinge that converts her romantic flight into solitary resolve.
• The Anonymous Captive: Their bond begins in fear—the captive sees a “witch”—and becomes dependence. The woman feeds, commands, and instructs, challenging Puritan certainties with the question of mutual grief (“Has he not a father and a sister who were also slayn?”). After the woman’s death, the captive raises her axe in learned self-defense, proof that care and toughness have been transmitted.
• Her second husband (a Praying Indian): Briefly sketched yet crucial, this marriage marks her full departure from colonial society. It plants her within Indigenous lifeways even as she never fully belongs, sharpening her role as a cultural intermediary who chooses loyalty to place over tribe.

Defining Moments

Her life turns on decisive acts that fuse making, guarding, and moral risk. Each leaves a physical or ethical residue the novel returns to.

• Fleeing the colony: Rejecting an arranged marriage, she opts for love and autonomy—establishing a pattern of self-determined choice that governs her whole life.
• Building the cabin and hearth: The “wide, flat stone” becomes the literal heart of the house, the first human imprint that future residents inherit, alter, and misread.
• Saving the captive and her baby: She rescues, feeds, and demands work—care as discipline—transforming the captive’s terror into survival knowledge.
• Poisoning the English scouts: Using “nightmaids” mushrooms, she kills three men to avert a massacre of a nearby village. This act crystallizes her ethic: violence in service of less violence, acceptance of guilt to choke off a wider stain.
• Death, burial, and legacy: Laid to rest on the land she made, she becomes part of its cycle; the orchard that later defines the site grows from remains tied to her act, binding her to The Cycle of Life, Death, and Renewal.

Essential Quotes

My sprite! he called his lover in the shelter of the darkness, and she looked back into his eyes. He was mad, she thought, naked but for his scraps of clothing, his axe, his clucking hen. This line captures the ecstatic, elemental energy of her first union: love stripped to tools, bodies, and a hen—both comic and mythic. Calling her “sprite” frames her as a quasi-spirit of the woods, already slipping the bounds of Puritan identity.

an old woman most strange came out, she was dressd in skirts and blankets like an Indian, but her face was English and she spoke both English and the heathen’s tongue. The captive’s description nails the woman’s liminality: outward signs of one culture, lineage of another, fluency in both. The doubleness is not confusion but competence—her chosen toolkit for survival and mediation.

And is he who slayd my father your friend, and is he who slayd my sister? And she said, Has he not a father and a sister who were also slayn? Here compassion and argument meet. The woman refuses the captive’s tidy moral binaries, insisting on reciprocity of grief; it’s not relativism but an ethic that counts all losses, pushing against tribal absolutes.

Will you not comfort me? and she said, I do not have the comfort which you seek. A statement of limits and truth. She offers food, shelter, instruction—but not consoling lies. The refusal defines her care as practical and honest, refusing piety that would dull the edge of reality.

You must understand what is about to happen must happen so that there is no more bloodshed. And I must have lookd afraid for she said, It is so the Evil stops. Before the poisoning, she frames her act as prophylactic justice. The capitalized “Evil” signals a moral calculus she has weighed and accepted, staking her soul on the claim that ending some lives can staunch a larger wound.