Barker, Jane (Vol. 80) - Kathryn R. King (essay date 2000)
Kathryn R. King (essay date 2000)
SOURCE: King, Kathryn R. “A Jacobite Novelist.” In Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725, pp. 147-79. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
[In the following essay, King tells the story of Barker as a Jacobite novelist, showing the connections between the plots of her novels and the political activities and ideologies of the Stuart court.]
Barker is in fact a supremely self-regarding writer, mindful of her gendered singularity and fascinated with the many ways to tell her own story; and it seems undeniable, if hard to prove, that her heroine, Galesia—poet, healer, virgin, femme savante, and odd woman—is in many ways a self-portrait. However, when the complex self-fashionings of the prose fictions, the Galesia trilogy in particular,1 are read in relation to their own political moment, these narratives emerge as complex elegiac responses to the declining fortunes of the exiled...
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