Barker, Jane (Vol. 42) | Kathryn R. King (essay date 1994)
Kathryn R. King (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Jane Barker, Political Recreations, and the Sociable Text," in ELH, Vol. 61, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 551-70.
[In the essay that follows, King explores Barker's participation in a complex literary community that also included men.]
In Writing Women's Literary History (1993), Margaret Ezell argues forcefully for a rethinking of the assumptions that govern feminist literary history.1 Feminist historiography, she contends, derives its models of female authorship from nineteenth-century practices; these models distort our understanding of the circumstances and modes of production of women writers of earlier eras. In the narratives generated by such a historiography early modern women writers are constructed as isolated eccentrics at odds with themselves and their culture; their story is the recurring one of exclusion and absence, of female voices silenced and female talents...
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