Barker, Jane (Vol. 80) | Jane Spencer (essay date 1983)
Jane Spencer (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: Spencer, Jane. “Creating the Women Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2, no. 2 (fall 1983): 165-81.
[In the following essay, Spencer claims that Barker's main concerns were to define herself as a woman and as a writer and to create for herself and her audience an acceptable self-image. Spencer also states that Barker's works are especially important to those interested in the history of women's writing and women's self-definition because they seem to be largely autobiographical.]
To some extent, the autobiographer's problem with the meaning of the self is shared by all writers. “For all literary artists,” write Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “self-definition necessarily precedes self-assertion”; and the problems of self-definition have been particularly acute for the female artist, as their study of nineteenth-century women writers...
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