Barker, Jane

Abstract

Jane Barker (bap. 1652–1732) was a poet, translator, and novelist. During her long life, Barker also occupied the roles of lay physician, political exile, Catholic convert, Jacobite polemicist, and head of an all-female household. Though Barker drew on her eventful life in verse and prose, her works are more than the sum of their autobiographical parts. She wrote poems on affairs of state, Pindaric odes, Horatian epistles, polemical dialogues, and reflections on loss and friendship. The poems she wrote while in St. Germain reflect the moral choices and shared history of those who went into exile with James II and provide a political, theological, and philosophical defense of Jacobitism, a cause to which Barker remained committed throughout her life. On her return to England, Barker translated a French devotional work and published the series of novels for which she is principally remembered. Barker’s novels are recognized for their psychological depth and social realism, and for the ways the author played with conventions of romance to represent the uneasy place of the learned single female writer.