This is the story of a Puritan woman who lived life with a gusto at odds with her h e r i t a g e and her surroundings. It was like the alluring Elizabeth Fones to marry a cousin in the Win-throp family, and the black sheep cousin, Harry, at that. Then, although a widow at twenty, she left with her infant daughter for the New World in 1631. In those days of hardship, famine, and Indian attack, there was only one way, in the minds of the governors of the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies, to hold together the sanity and identity of the colonists. That was through a strong and bigoted, theocratic government. It is against this background of rigidity and conformity that Bess Winthrop dared to befriend Anne Hutchinson at the moment of her banishment from the Bay Colony; dared to challenge a determined army captain bent on the massacre of her friends the Siwanoy Indians; and, above all, dared to love a man as her heart and her whole being commanded. And so, as a response to this almost unmatched courage and vitality, Governor John Winthrop came to refer to this woman in the historical records of the time as his "unregenerate niece." Through Bess Winthrop's three marriages, passionate beliefs, and countless rebellions against bigotry, this perceptive novel (which is also an authoritative and thoroughly documented account) portrays the fortitude, humiliation, and ultimate triumph of the Winthrop woman, who believed in a concept of happiness transcending that of her own day.