[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 demonstrates.¹ If women had difficulty in defining themselves as writers in the nineteenth century when there were many successful women poets and novelists, the problem was worse in the seventeenth when writing for publication was a most unusual and generally unacceptable occupation for a woman. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, publishing her Poems, and Fancies in 1653, wrote, “I imagine I shall be censur'd by my owne Sex; and Men will cast a smile of scorne upon my Book, because they think thereby, Women incroach too much upon their Prerogatives.” Dorothy Osborne, herself a woman of some literary talent, greeted Cavendish's work with amazed disapproval. “Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books, and in verse too. If I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that,” she wrote. Professional women writers like Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Catherine Trotter and Mary Pix were usually bolder in self-definition and self-assertion; but even Behn, who led the way in this respect, tended to think of her literary skill as a masculine attribute. She wanted “the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me … to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv'd in.”² By the early eighteenth century, the reading and theater-going public had at least been alerted to the idea of women's writing, but the woman writer had not gained widespread acceptance. To the fear that a woman's writing could be criticized as a presumptuous abandonment of the proper feminine role was added the fear of gaining the reputation for immorality associated with writers like Behn and Manley. It was still by no means easy for a woman to claim or justify a literary vocation.

In the works of Jane Barker, a little-known author of late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England, we can observe one attempt to overcome the problems facing women writers in this period. Barker produced a variety of literary work. She began with poetry, her first publication being Poetical Recreations in 1688. Love Intrigues: Or, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713) marked her entry into the expanding literary market for prose narrative. Exilius (1715) is a romance dealing with the intertwined adventures of several pairs of heroic lovers. A translation from Fénelon appeared as The Christian Pilgrimmage in 1718. Her last two publications, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726), continued Galesia's story. In the long gap between the publications of the poems and the first narrative, she wrote a number of poems which are extant in manuscript.³ Barker's achievements deserve more recognition than they have so far received. Some of the manuscript poems show her to be of great historical interest as a Jacobite poet. Her contribution to the development of the novel is even more important. My main interest here, however, is the “anxiety of authorship” which colors her poems and her Galesia narratives.⁴ I hope to show that one of her most pressing concerns was to define herself as a woman and a writer, and to create a self-image that would be acceptable to herself and to her public.

Jane Barker's work is especially pertinent to the question of the woman writer's self-definition because it appears to be largely autobiographical. Very little is known of her life apart from what can be gathered from her writings. They tell us of her childhood in Wiltsthorp, her close relationship with her brother who studied medicine and instructed her in the subject, and her grief at his early death.⁵ The deaths of her parents are recorded in her narratives and poems.⁶ Jane Barker converted to Roman Catholicism. She left England soon after James II and lived for some years in the court-in-exile at St. Germain.⁷ After her return to England she was patronized by the Countess of Exeter, to whom she dedicated Exilius. Nothing is known of her after the publication of The Lining. From the frequent correspondences between statements Jane Barker makes about herself, and evidence about her which can be gathered from the publication details of her books, it seems that we are safe in assuming her works to be autobiographical.⁸ Further details of her life have been found in external sources using her works as the starting point. G. S. Gibbons identifies the Uncle, Colonel C—, mentioned in Poetical Recreations, as William Connock, who served with James II's army in Ireland. He finds Jane Barker of Wiltsthorp, spinster, who has an estate of £47 10s. annual value, mentioned in a list of Roman Catholic nonjurors in 1715.⁹ Thus we gain more details for the picture of Barker as a woman whose family espoused the Stuart cause, who became a Catholic, and who was living in England on a small income in the early eighteenth century.

This does not mean, of course, that Barker offers an entirely factual account of her life. It would be hard to ascertain to what extent the stories of the love affair in Bosvil and Galesia and the problems with various suitors in A Patch-Work Screen are based on true events. Some of the interpolated tales in A Patch-Work Screen and The Lining are certainly fictional, but this does not destroy the autobiographical significance of the narratives. In his work on autobiography, Georges Gusdorf emphasizes that it can never offer us the “truth” of a life but constructs a life from what the writer creates, as well as what she or he remembers and distorts in the act of remembering. The autobiography shows what the writer “believes and wishes himself [sic] to be and to have been. What is in question is a sort of revaluation of individual destiny.”¹⁰ On the basis of this theoretical assumption, I intend to approach Jane Barker as a writer who offers us, in the way of autobiographers, not so much the facts of her life as her creation of “the meaning of [her] own mythic tale.”¹¹ I hope to show that the meaning of the tale in Barker's case is the presentation and explanation of a life which deviates in many ways from the norm prescribed for women. It is the life of a spinster, a healer, an intellectual, a writer. All are significant parts of Barker's image of herself, but the image of the writer is of key importance because on this image depends the articulation of all the others.

In creating her autobiography, Barker chooses to fictionalize her identity in the pseudonyms Galesia (sometimes spelled Galecia or Galaecia) and Fidelia. The two personae are used to present her experiences in different ways. Fidelia, as her name implies, represents fidelity—to Jacobitism and to her chosen religion—and she is used in poems dealing mainly with religious and political topics. Galesia is used for poems and narratives dealing with Barker's life before her journey to France and after her return. Poems addressed to Barker sometimes call her Mrs. Jane Barker, and sometimes Galesia, suggesting how clearly she was identified by her friends with her pseudonym.¹² One question to be considered about Barker, then, is how this use of a persona affects her work as autobiography.

The adoption of the romantic name Galesia was one of many ways in which Barker wrapped her life-story in the conventions of romance. She was both protecting herself, and offering the public the kind of work it wanted, by disguising her autobiography as a “diverting Novel.”¹³ The central reason for the self-disguise, however, may be that by calling herself Galesia, Barker immediately became, in her own and her readers' eyes, a heroine like the heroines of romance and pastoral. This meant that the significance of her life-story was established at the outset and that her conduct could be explained by being related to the conduct of other literary heroines. By making her autobiography into a romance about a version of herself called Galesia, Barker gained all the advantages of a heroine's identity.

One advantage of being a heroine was that it made it easier to define herself as a woman writer. There was already a tradition linking the two identities. In the seventeenth-century romances produced in the world of the French salons, the characters were often based on men and women known to the writer, and part of the appeal of a romance for members of these select circles was to recognize their friends and themselves transformed into idealized heroes and heroines.¹⁴ In this transference of the status of literary heroine to women in a literary circle, we see the beginnings of the implication that a literary woman is a heroine. Romances frequently included epistles written by the heroines who could thus become models for the woman writer. English women who, often inspired by the précieuses, corresponded under literary pseudonyms taken from pastorals and romances, contributed to the identification of woman writer with literary heroine. Katherine Philips, as “Orinda,” corresponded with a number of friends who also adopted pastoral pseudonyms. Jane Barker in her youth had a circle of literary friends to whom she was known as Galesia. When women writers known as “Orinda” or “Astrea” (Aphra Behn) began to publish their work, the idea that a woman writer was somehow akin to a heroine in romance gained wider currency. For these reasons, Barker's Galesia could simultaneously serve as the heroine of a romance and as a representation of herself as a writer.

Barker represents herself as Galesia the writer in Poetical Recreations and in a number of the manuscript poems, and some poems from these collections are inserted into the first two Galesia narratives, Bosvil and Galesia and A Patch-Work Screen. Her use of poems written in her youth about her poetic vocation to help in the construction of Galesia's story many years later shows that Barker was preoccupied with this subject over a long period. Sometimes the changed context of the poems within the narratives alters their significance. Here, I am concerned with the poems only as elements of the later narratives, contributing to Barker's creation of the heroine-writer of the autobiographical romance.

Bosvil and Galesia, A Patch-Work Screen, and The Lining are successive creations of Galesia's identity as heroine-writer through the account of various stages of her life. Bosvil and Galesia is the story of the failed love affair of her youth, told by Galesia to her friend Lucasia years after the event. Galesia falls in love with Bosvil and manages to conceal her feelings while puzzling to understand his. He sometimes appears as an enthusiastic lover and sometimes, for no apparent reason, he ignores her. On one occasion, when Bosvil explains his long absence as a result of illness and produces a marriage license to back up his proposals, Galesia's belief in his love seems justified; but this is followed by a three-weeks' absence after which Bosvil reappears, cold and indifferent again. Eventually he marries another woman, and so ends a relationship that Galesia sums up as “one continu'd Act of Folly on the one side, and Treachery on the other” (Bosvil and Galesia, p. 64).

This definition of the heroine's relationship with her lover in terms of her folly and his treachery is one indication that Galesia's story is a variant of what Nancy K. Miller calls “the heroine's text”: that is, “the text of an ideology that codes femininity in paradigms of sexual vulnerability.”¹⁵ Miller sees the feminocentric novels of the eighteenth century as expressions of the period's obsession with womanhood and with the inscription of feminine destiny in terms of sexuality. “In Moll Flanders, La Vie de Marianne, Pamela, and Fanny Hill … the fundamental structuring sequence is set in motion by a confrontation between feminine virtue and illicit masculine desire.”¹⁶ The typical heroine's text is a story of seduction suffered or avoided.

Galesia's story does not fit this description exactly, for Bosvil neither seduces nor attempts to seduce her. The idea of the seduction tale nevertheless haunts Galesia throughout their acquaintance and offers her a means of interpreting his enigmatic behavior. From the beginning she suspects him of masculine treachery. Bosvil visits Galesia while she is staying in London under her aunt's protection and openly declares his love; but she, wary of town libertinism and fearful of losing her reputation, has “the Cunning to conceal [her] Passion, and pretend not to believe his” (p. 8). Her mistrust seems justified by his altered behavior when he visits her after her return home. Though he later resumes the role of lover, he does not make his intentions known to her parents, and this in itself makes the courtship an illicit one. Galesia eventually avoids any slur on her reputation only at the cost of losing Bosvil altogether. When he is at his most eager as a lover, he complains that her reserve has convinced him that she cannot love him. Though she now believes herself to be on the verge of matrimony, Galesia does not confess her love, but resolves that next time she sees him she will be “no longer cruel to my self, and him; but let him know what mighty Sums of Love I had been hoarding up for him, since the Moment of our first Interview” (p. 37). It is too late. Bosvil never returns in the posture of a lover again.

Galesia's story ends with neither of the alternatives (seduction, leading to catastrophe, or avoided seduction, leading to marriage) usual to eighteenth-century heroines. Her failure to marry appears an oddity to critics who do not take the autobiographical nature of the narratives into account.¹⁷Bosvil and Galesia has to be understood both as a “heroine's text” and as autobiography because Barker has superimposed the literary convention of the heroine's sexual and social initiation onto the structure of her own single life. Galesia is not, like the typical heroine-narrator, recalling her pre-marital life or excusing a sexual lapse; instead, she is explaining the lack of a sexual relationship in her life. She attributes to herself the characteristics of heroines whose destiny she does not share in order to make her single life seem equally valid as another kind of heroine's destiny.

The failure of the Bosvil-Galesia relationship can be attributed to Galesia's pride and her vulnerability, both of which are explained in terms of her identity as heroine. She admits that it was pride that prevented her from telling Bosvil that she loved him, and from confiding in her mother, who might have been able to bring about a happy conclusion to the affair. Such pride is explicable as the characteristic of a romance heroine. In the French heroic romance of the seventeenth century, the position of the heroine is one of despotic power over her lover. He is expected to serve her for years for the reward only of kissing her hand or hearing that she is so gracious as not to hate him. Galesia the narrator portrays her younger self as a vain imitator of the romance heroine: “I pleased my self to think how [one of her suitors, Brafort] wou'd be balk'd, who, I thought, had been very remiss in his Devoirs towards such a Goddess, as the World's Flatterers had made of me,” she reports (p. 10). Galesia acts the goddess when Bosvil declares his love. His dedication of “every Action of his Life to love, please and serve” her is met with the haughty command to “Cease … these Asseverations” (p. 27). He declares he will die if she does not return his love, and she offers not love but friendship, though her heart has a secret fondness for him. This is strictly virtuous according to the conventions of romance, but as narrator, Galesia interprets this failure to be frank as pride, which leads to the loss of Bosvil.

The mockery of the heroine's pride, however, reveals the vulnerability behind it. Galesia is not the powerful heroine she believes herself to be, and Bosvil certainly will not die without her love. The theme of the vulnerability behind the heroine's pride is developed through the use of other literary idioms. Bosvil proposes a friend of his to Galesia's father as a husband for Galesia. In her anger about this, Galesia changes from heroine of romance to the passionate woman of heroic drama. She is thwarted in her love and intent on revenge, and her language and actions are appropriate to heroic tragedy:

I went towards the Place of his Abode, supposing a Rapier in my hand, and saying to my self, The false Bosvil shou'd now disquiet me no more, nor any other of our Sex; in him I will end his Race, no more of them shall come to disturb, or affront Womankind; this only Son, shall dye by the hands of me an only Daughter.

(p. 43)

In this passage, the rapier exists only in Galesia's fancy, but in the second edition of Bosvil and Galesia (1719), Galesia actually seizes “a Steel Rapier, which stood in the Hall.”¹⁸ However, instead of carrying out her intention, she bursts into tears and turns her anger against herself. Galesia the narrator comments on this as an example of female weakness: “if the Feebleness of our Hands did not moderate the Fury of our Heads, Woman sometimes would exceed the fiercest Savages, especially when affronted in her Amours” (p. 44). This undercuts the former Galesia's heroic stance and ranks her rather with the ridiculed cast-off mistresses of Restoration comedy who fail in their attempts to attack their ex-lovers.¹⁹ The younger Galesia, revealed like these characters as a weak woman behind her heroic posture, is viewed with some mockery. At the same time there is sympathy for her as a victim who, in the revised version of the story, laments “Why was I born, or why a Female born” (2nd ed., p. 40).

At times, Galesia even justifies her pride as the necessary effect of female vulnerability and thus offers a different interpretation of the love affair. Her behavior towards her early suitor, Brafort, is haughtiness masquerading as modesty, but she excuses herself because “as the World now rolls, we are under a Kind of Constraint to follow its Byass” (p. 10). Her behavior with Bosvil can also be seen as dictated by convention. Thus there is a wide difference between Bosvil's reticence about his feelings and her silence about her love for him. Given the restrictive code of feminine behavior that makes an admission of love tantamount to a loss of chastity, a woman must be careful not to “betray [her] Weakness by a too ready Compliance” (pp. 21-22). It is the man's duty to make his feelings clear, and Galesia has the right to complain of Bosvil that “his Tongue was the only part silent in the Declaration of a violent Passion” (p. 18). The failure of their love, then, is Bosvil's fault more than Galesia's: he fails to understand and allow for her vulnerability as a woman.

The paradox of this heroine's text is that because Galesia behaves like a proper heroine, she is prevented from fulfilling a heroine's destiny. Thus the story contains an implicit criticism of the conventions governing women “as the World now rolls.” At the same time, underlying the surface narrative of self-justification in the face of failure, is the tale of a different kind of success. The thwarted romance-heroine becomes the heroine-poet.

It is during the first of Bosvil's recurrent periods of coldness towards her that Galesia first identifies herself as a poet. On one of her melancholy, solitary walks she composes a poem, elsewhere referred to as her “contract with the muses,” in which she dedicates herself to poetry:

Methinks these Shades, strange Thoughts suggest,
Which heat my Head, and cool my Breast;
And mind me of a Laurel Crest.
Methinks I hear the Muses sing,
And see 'em all dance in a Ring;
And call upon me to take Wing.
We will (say they) assist thy Flight,
Till thou reach fair ORINDA's Height,
If thou can'st this World's Follies slight.
We'll bring thee to our bright Abodes,
Among the Heroes and the Gods,
If thou and Wealth can be at Odds.
Then gentle Maid cast off thy Chain,
Which links thee to thy faithless Swain,
And vow a Virgin to remain.
Write, write thy Vow upon this Tree,
By us it shall recorded be;
And thou enjoy Eternity.

(p. 14)²⁰

The choice is clear. Married life has been renounced in exchange for the promise of literary achievement. In the reference to Orinda we notice the importance of real-life heroines, as well as literary models, for creating the woman writer's sense of identity. Katherine Philips is, in Gilbert and Gubar's terms, the “female precursor” who makes Galesia's assumption of poetic identity possible.²¹ Galesia also appeals, like other women writers of her time, to the example of Sappho: “I imagin'd myself the Orinda, or Sapho of my time,” she explains (p. 15).

Galesia becomes a healer as well as a poet. She decides to imitate “the Faithful Shepperdess in the Play” (Clorin, in Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess) in perpetual chastity and in practicing medicine with herbal remedies. Her two vocations are neatly united in the identity of “Apollo's Darling Daughter,” Apollo being god of poetry and of medicine (p. 15). However, there is something of a sarcastic tone in this description of her early ambitions, or “thousand vain Conceits” (p. 15), which led her into “Pride, with all its vile Adherents” (p. 17); and the intellectual life is described as a mere substitute for Bosvil's love: “I, finding my self abandoned by Bosvil, and thinking it impossible ever to love again, resolved to espouse a Book, and spend my Days in Study” (p. 15).

As narrator, Galesia criticizes her dedication to study, medicine, and poetry; but she leaves no doubt that these vocations are the most important parts of her life. Although the vow to the muses is presented as a reaction to the loss of love, Galesia's readiness to make such a vow contrasts with her careful avoidance of making any promises to her lover. It is significant that one very important image of Galesia as poet is found when the love affair appears to be on the point of success. After Bosvil has played devoted romance hero to her haughty romance heroine, Galesia's thoughts are “in a Sea of Joy,” as she believes their marriage to be a certainty (p. 32). At this high point of happiness, she falls asleep in the garden and dreams that an “angry Power” makes her climb a high mountain (evidently the poets' mountain, Parnassus). Then he takes her to the tree on which she wrote her contract with the muses. He warns her that there is no escaping the poet's fate now: “Since, since thou hast the Muses chose, / Hymen and Fortune are thy Foes” (p. 33). According to this “uncouth Guardian,” Galesia's poetic vocation is to lose her Bosvil's love and the chance of marriage, but the choice has been hers. The opposition between poetry and love is intensified in the second edition of Bosvil and Galesia, in which, when Galesia climbs Parnassus, Bosvil attempts to “tumble [her] down,” but is prevented by the guardian (2nd ed., p. 29). The sexual implication in this encounter befits Galesia's identification of poetry with chastity. There is a covert suggestion in this that Galesia's reserve towards Bosvil was adopted not just from fear of being seduced but from fear of being seduced away from her vocation. The dream as a whole implies that her contract with the muses was not merely a reaction to Bosvil's behavior but an expression of her preference for an unmarried life of study and poetry.

Barker's later narratives continue to develop the picture of Galesia established in Bosvil and Galesia. The narrator of A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies is Galesia after her return from France. Her narrative deals with the events following Bosvil's desertion, but thematically it re-enacts the same struggle between poetry and love. Once Bosvil has gone, Galesia devotes herself to the study of Orinda:

I began to emulate her Wit, and aspired to imitate her Writings; in doing of which, I think, I deserved Arachne's Fate, or at least to be transform'd into one of the lowest of Mack-Fleckno's Followers: Her noble Genius being inimitable … each line [of her poetry] was like a Ladder to climb, not only to Parnassus, but to Heaven: which I (poor Puzzle as I was!) had the Boldness to try to imitate, 'till I was dropped into a Labyrinth of Poetry, which has ever since interlac'd all the Actions of my Life.

(A Patch-Work Screen, p. 3)

This attitude to the poetic vocation is typical of A Patch-Work Screen as a whole. Admiration of the model woman writer is combined with self-mockery and self-depreciation of Galesia's own attempts to write. At the same time there is a sense of pride for having embraced the fate of a poet, whatever the effects on the rest of her life.

In fact, the idea that poetry is Galesia's fate is even stronger in A Patch-Work Screen than in Bosvil and Galesia. Love has much less power to disturb the poetic life for instead of the long drawn out emotional turmoil of the relationship with Bosvil, this narrative presents a series of suitors, briefly sketched and rapidly dismissed, whom neither Galesia nor the reader can take seriously. While Galesia's entry into the labyrinth of poetry is sometimes dated after the loss of Bosvil, as in the above quotation, at other times it is claimed that the poet's fate was sealed in her childhood. One poem in the narrative which makes this claim, “The Necessity of Fate,” was first published in Barker's 1688 collection. Having described her failure to cast off the “Chain” of poetry, the poet laments,

All this, my Fate, all this thou didst fore show,
          Ev'n when I was a Child,
          When in my Picture's Hand,
          My Mother did command,
There should be drawn a Lawrel Bough.
Lo! then my Muse sat by, and smil'd. …

(p. 94)²²

The muse smiled because she knew Galesia would forsake

Soaring Honours, vain Persuits of Pleasure,
And vainer Fruits of worldly Treasure,
          All for the Muses melancholy Tree,
          E'er I knew ought of its great Mystery.

(p. 95)

Reflecting on this, the poet reconciles herself to her fate and asks for the reward appropriate to her dedication to poetry—to be crowned with the laurel: “Since, O my Fate! thou needs wilt have it so, / Let thy kind Hand exalt it to my Brow” (p. 95). Galesia's mother's comment on this poem provides the comic deflation that Barker is always ready to give after an exaltation of her poetic identity. “I think, Fate would be more kind to set a Basket, or a Milk-pail on thy Head; thereby to suppress those foolish Vapours that thus intoxicate thy Brain” (p. 95). However, her mother also adds, “I shall no more oppose thy Fancy [for poetry] but comply and indulge so innocent a Diversion” (p. 95).

Her acceptance of Galesia as poet is important, for up to this point she has been opposing this identity with her own recommendation that Galesia should get married, “This being the Business for which you came into the World,” as she tells her (p. 80). Galesia cannot oppose what she believes to be the truth of this, but she retains her “secret Disgust against Matrimony” (p. 80), and her preference for poetry.

Fortunately, the many suitors who appear on the scene all justify Galesia's rejection of them by proving unworthy. One young gentleman who offers marriage is mistrusted by her from the start because he is known to have been a rake. Even when all the correct procedures have been followed, with his father making a formal proposal to hers, she suspects him of intending to seduce her. Luckily she is saved from either compliance or rebellion when her would-be lover is hanged for a robbery committed in a frolic. Those she describes as “Pretenders to my Person” after her father's death has left her fortune in her own power (p. 40) are easily dismissed as mercenary, and “These Amours affected me but little, or rather not at all,” she reports (p. 42). It is harder to reject a worthier character who does not appeal to her because he is “a little in Years” (p. 49), but she manages to discourage him. Later, her reputation for virtue threatens to trap her when the mother of profligate young Lysander asks her to marry and thereby reform him. However, Lysander has put his fortune into the hands of an adulteress who paid his debts for him, and she refuses to let him marry, so he shoots himself. Despite Galesia's laments that some devil has been allowed “to persecute me in the Persons of all that pretended to love or like me” (p. 89), she is obviously relieved at his disappearance: “you cannot imagine, that his Death affected me much as a Lover, there being but little of that in the Story” (p. 88).

It is not only her own experience that convinces Galesia that she is right to reject sexual involvement. The stories interpolated in her narrative often serve the purpose of further demonstrating the dangers both of illicit sexuality and of marriages entered into from a sense of duty. In her capacity as physician, Galesia is consulted by a girl who has been seduced and is suffering from a venereal disease (pp. 51-54). Soon afterwards she hears the story of a nurse who made the mistake of marrying according to her father's “prudent” wishes, and was reduced to poverty while the lover she had been forced to give up as unsuitable for an heiress himself became rich (pp. 59-63).

No wonder, on the whole, that Galesia decides in favor of “A Virgin Life,” as she calls one of her poems. She explicitly links such a life with poetic achievement:

Since, O good Heavens! you have bestow'd on me
So great a Kindness for Virginity,
Suffer me not to fall into the Powers
Of Man's almost Omnipotent Amours.
But let me in this happy State remain,
And in chaste Verse my chaster Thoughts explain.

(p. 90)²³

To Galesia, chastity means poetry. Orinda's example is important in sustaining this link. Although Katherine Philips, a married woman, could not serve as a model for Jane Barker's “Virgin Life,” her reputation as “chaste Orinda” was a useful one to set against the common belief that to be a woman writer was proof in itself of sexual looseness.

Galesia does not receive any such accusation. On the contrary, she is criticized for her love of the single life. Her mother fears that her “idle Dreams on Parnassus, and foolish Romantick flights, with Icarus” (p. 79) will give her a bad reputation for folly and the eccentricity of a solitary life, not for sexual misconduct. Nevertheless, Galesia's continual insistence on the chastity of poetry perhaps suggests that the bad reputation of some women writers disturbs her. Fears about a possible connection between poetry and sexuality are perhaps expressed in the story of Galesia's adventure in the garret-closet. While she and her mother are lodging in London, Galesia escapes from the noisy world into “a Closet in my Landlady's Back-Garret which I crept into, as if it had been a Cave on the Top of Parnassus” (p. 64). She adds that “this Hole was to me a kind of Paradise” (p. 65). Here she resumes her intellectual life and her poetry. The closet is both a retreat from the world and a vantage-point from which she can survey it, giving free play to her intellect:

Out of this Garret, there was a Door went out to the Leads; on which I us'd frequently to walk to take the Air … here I was alone, or, as the Philosopher says, never less alone. Here I entertain'd my Thoughts, and indulg'd my solitary Fancy. Here I could behold the Parliament-House, Westminster-Hall, and the Abbey, and admir'd the Magnificence of their Structure, and still more, the Greatness of Mind in those who had been their Founders.

(p. 67)

As usual, Galesia wavers between acceptance and rejection of her muse. She writes two poems within a few days of each other, one a warning against poetry, the other ending with a welcome to the muse. The turmoil of her mind as she considers this question is interrupted by “a hasty Knocking on the Door of the Leads” (p. 73). She opens the door to find a distressed young woman, Belinda. Her story is the familiar one of eighteenth-century narrative: she has been seduced and abandoned and is pregnant. She was fleeing across the rooftops of London to avoid the parish officers when she found Galesia's garret. This incident, Galesia explains, “prov'd a Misfortune to me; for hereupon my Mother prohibited me my Garret-Closet, and my Walk on the Leads; lest I should encounter more Adventures, not only like this, but perhaps more pernicious” (p. 78). Galesia's solitary retreat has become a source of danger. When she is up in her innocent poetic paradise, a seduced woman appears at the door. Poetry and intellectual interests it seems, however innocent Galesia's intentions, will lead her to pernicious adventures.

In A Patch-Work Screen Galesia is surrounded by various arguments against her poetic and intellectual vocation. However, her bitter feelings that a learned woman may be “at best but like a Forc'd Plant, that never has its due or proper Relish” (p. 11) are counteracted, not only by her mother's change of heart towards the end, but by the attitude of the lady to whom her story is related. When Galesia tells her about being forbidden her garret-closet, the lady flatteringly compares her to Ovid in banishment (p. 78). When Galesia apologizes for her poems, the lady tells her, “I like them all so well, I will not have One lay'd aside” (p. 21). This appreciative listener plays an important part in A Patch-Work Screen for she helps Galesia to reconcile her writing career with her feminine identity. When Galesia goes to stay with the lady, she finds her employed on a patch-work “most curiously compos'd of rich Silks, and Silver and Gold Brocades: The whole Furniture was completed excepting a SCREEN, which the Lady and her Maids were going about” (Introduction, sig. a5r-a5v). Galesia is invited to contribute to this typically feminine endeavor, but the unconventional life she has led has left her with no silks or brocades to offer. They open Galesia's trunks and boxes, but “alas! they found nothing but Pieces of Romances, Poems, Love-Letters, and the like” (sig. a5v). However, Galesia's new friend smiles at this. She is happy to accept these pieces of writing instead of more feminine patches, and it is from them that the patch-work screen is composed. Galesia's story of her writing career is therefore set in a framework which justifies it by relating it to feminine accomplishments.

The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen is written to a similar plan. One side of the screen has been covered, and now the screen must be lined. Interpolated tales fill up much of the narrative. Galesia in this work is Jane Barker's self-portrait in her old age. Though she has a much less prominent position here than in the previous narratives, she reveals a good deal about Barker's attitude to literature and to women's writing. Galesia looks to the past for her inspiration, treating the present as a time of lamentable moral decay in literature:

Those honourable Romances of old Arcadia, Cleopatra, Cassandra, &c. discover a Genius of Vertue and Honour, which reign'd in the time of those Heroes, and Heroines, as well as in the Authors that report them; but the Stories of our Times are so black, that the Authors, can hardly escape being smutted, or defil'd in touching such Pitch.²⁴

The celebration of the woman writer's abilities is similarly confined to the past. Her praise is given, as usual, to Katherine Philips, who died in 1664, not to any woman writer living in the eighteenth century. This is shown in a dream within the narrative. A young man calling himself her “good Genius” leads Galesia up Parnassus where they find “Orinda seated on a Throne, as Queen of Female Writers, with a Golden Pen in her Hand for a Scepter, a Crown of Laurel on her Head” (The Lining, p. 174). A bard sings Orinda's praises. Like other contemporary eulogists of women's poetry, he sees in it a unity of masculine and feminine qualities:

          As in Angels, we
          Do in thy Verses see
Both improv'd Sexes eminently meet,
They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet.

(p. 175)

There is something wistful in the description of Galesia's appearance on this occasion. She arrives “somewhat late; so that the grand Ceremonies were over,” and sits inconspicuously “in a Corner, where she might see and hear all that pass'd” (p. 174). This perhaps expresses Barker's feelings late in her life that she has survived into a new and uncongenial age when the great tributes to the poet she admires are over, and that she herself has failed in her ambition to “reach fair ORINDA's Height.” However, she does claim the right to celebrate the achievement of her model woman poet and through her the abilities of women as writers.

Jane Barker's allegiance may have been to the past, but her autobiographical narratives point to plots of the future. Barker loved the seventeenth-century romances, old fashioned by the early eighteenth century. Exilius: or, The Banish'd Roman (1715) is modelled on them, and it concludes with the marriages of numerous pairs of lovers. In the Galesia narratives, however, Barker's consideration of her own life makes her search for an alternative to this literary convention. Literary sources, as we have seen, helped Barker create Galesia, but the plots of fiction offer Galesia no conclusion satisfactory to Barker. While other writers were just beginning to establish the feminocentric novel of the heroine's journey to identity through marriage, Jane Barker was offering an alternative pattern for the novel far in advance of her time. Her unmarried heroine achieves her identity through study, the practice of medicine, and writing. This important innovation results from Jane Barker's blend of fictional conventions with autobiographical plot, a blend made because of her need as a woman writer to create an identity for herself.

Galesia is the portrait of a woman writer offered by one woman writer to the early eighteenth-century reading public. Her emphasis on the chastity of the female writer is important not only to her personally, but to the history of women writers. In Barker's time leisured women who wrote poetry were considered respectable, while mercenary women writers were often thought of as immoral women combining illicit sexual behavior in their lives with bawdry in their writings. Jane Barker is careful to place herself on the side of the reputable woman writer. Katherine Philips is contrasted with Aphra Behn, and Barker's disapproval of the type of writer Behn represents is made clear. In A Patch-Work Screen Galesia reports that a lady she met, “asked me, if I lik'd Mrs. Phillips, or Mrs. Behn best? To whom I reply'd, with a blunt Indignation, that they ought not to be nam'd together” (p. 44). This is a very different attitude from that taken by writers like Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter, and Delariviere Manley in the late seventeenth century. They compared each other to both Astrea and Orinda, seeing both as shining examples of the woman writer's power. Manley called Catherine Trotter the successor to “Orinda, and the Fair Astrea,” and she herself was described by Mary Pix as “Like Sapho Charming, like Afra Eloquent, / Like chaste Orinda, sweetly Innocent.”²⁵ For Jane Barker only Sappho and the chaste Orinda can be acceptable models.

Jane Barker was one of the earliest “respectable” women novelists, uniting the mercenary motive of the professional woman writer and the chastity associated with the leisured poetess. In a century when women writers increased significantly in numbers and gained some acceptance from the general public, she contributed to the growing idea that a woman writer—even when she wrote novels—could be chaste, moral, and respectable. This meant that the woman writer's role in the eighteenth century was a narrow one, for her life and her works were usually judged on the basis of the chastity, or lack of it, displayed there. However, this belief in the chaste female writer did help create a climate in which a number of women writers achieved popular success and public respect.

Jane Barker's work, then, is of great importance to everyone interested in the history of women's writing. Her Galesia narratives contain perhaps the first attempt to make a woman's literary talent the central interest of a story. In them we witness Barker's personal struggle to come to terms with her literary ambitions, and we also gain insight into the creation of the woman writer as a publicly acceptable figure.

Notes

1. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 17.

2. Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (London, 1653; Facsimile Reprint, Scholar Press, 1972), Introduction, n. pag.; Dorothy Osborne, Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple 1652-54, ed. Kingsley Hart (Folio Society, 1968), p. 53; Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance (London, 1687), Preface, n. pag.

3. In one manuscript, “A Collection of Poems Refering to the times” (British Library Add. Ms 21, 621), Barker, as “Fidelia,” discusses public affairs in the years 1685-1700 from a Jacobite point of view. There is also a three-part manuscript volume, the first part comprising these “Fidelia” poems, the second containing some unpublished poems and some which are printed (with alterations) in the later narratives, and the third part being a revised version of the 1688 poems. This volume is in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford (MS 343). I am indebted to Mr. F. W. J. Scovil of Magdalen College for his kind help and to the President and Fellows of the College for permission to quote from this volume.

4. The term comes from Gilbert and Gubar's revision of Harold Bloom: “the ‘anxiety of influence’ that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary ‘anxiety of authorship’—a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor,’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 48-49).

5. Wiltsthorp is mentioned in Poetical Recreations: Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, &c. With Several New Translations (London: Benjamin Crayle, 1688), Part I, p. 19. Her tuition in medicine by her brother is referred to in Love Intrigues: Or, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (London: E. Curll and C. Crownfield, 1713), pp. 52-53. It is also described in A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (London: E. Curll and T. Payne, 1723), pp. 10-11, and in Poetical Recreations, Part I, pp. 31-32. A poem “On the Death of my Brother” appears in Poetical Recreations, Part I, p. 107, and his death is mentioned in A Patch-Work Screen, p. 12. Biographical accounts of Jane Barker can be found in Karl Stanglmaier, Mrs. Jane Barker. Ein Beitrag zur Englischen Literaturgesichte (Berlin, 1906), and in W. H. McBurney, “Edmund Curll, Mrs. Jane Barker, and the English Novel,” Philological Quarterly, 37 (1958), 385-99.

6. See “Poems Refering to the Times,” p. 1, and A Patch-Work Screen, p. 39 and p. 126.

7. “Poems Refering to the Times,” passim. For her decision to leave England see p. 58; for her decision to become a Catholic see the poetic dialogues on pp. 31-44.

8. For example, in A Patch-Work Screen, pp. 22-23, Galesia refers to friends in Cambridge colleges who encouraged her to write; this is corroborated by the appearance of her poems in 1688 together with some poems addressed to her by Cambridge men. Her own reference to Wiltsthorp is corroborated by the title page of A Patch-Work Screen, which identifies her as “Mrs. Jane Barker, of Wiltsthorp, near Stamford, in Lincolnshire.” The long gap between the 1688 poems and the publication of her narratives fits in with the account she gives of spending years in France.

9. G. S. Gibbons, “Mrs. Jane Barker,” Notes and Queries ser. XI, No. 12 (1922), 278.

10. Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 45.

11. Gusdorf, p. 48.

12. The first part of Poetical Recreations, which contains Barker's poetry, is prefaced by poems in her praise. Three of these address her as Jane Barker and one as “the Incomparable Galaecia.” The second part, containing poems by a number of people, includes more poems to Barker. Two of these refer to her by her pseudonym: “On the most charming Galecia's Picture,” Part II, p. 190, and “The Young Lover's Advocate: being an Answer to a Copy of Verses: Written by Galaecia to her Young Lover on his Vow,” Part II, p. 192.

13. See Bosvil and Galesia, p. 2. The title pages of both first and second editions of the work call it a novel.

14. T. P. Haviland, The roman de longue haleine on English soil (Philadelphia, 1931), p. 15.

15. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. ix.

16. Miller, p. 4.

17. P. M. Spacks, for example, writes that “One might expect A Patch-Work Screen to bring its heroine to a more satisfactory conclusion, educating her to achieve happiness in wedlock. … Galesia never manages to marry, the book ends in medias res with her mother's death and a series of poetic meditations on religious subjects, and the heroine's failure to unite herself to a man has come to seem oddly like a triumph.” Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 66-67.

18. The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, As related to Lucasia in St. Germain's Garden. A Novel. 2nd ed., corrected (London: A. Bettesworth and E. Curll, 1719), p. 39.

19. For example, Termagant in Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia (1688) tries to stab and to shoot her ex-lover Belford, and Lady Touchwood in Congreve's Double Dealer (1694) tries to attack her ex-lover, Maskwell, with a dagger. For the treatment of these and other deserted mistresses in Restoration comedy, see Candace Brook Katz, “The Deserted Mistress Motif in Mrs. Manley's Lost Lover, 1696,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, XVI, No. 1 (May, 1977), 27-39.

20. This poem is found in “part the second” of Magdalen MS 343, p. 37, and is given the title “The contract with the muses writ on the bark of a shady ash-tree” in the list of contents to this volume. There are some differences, mainly in spelling, between the two versions. In the manuscript this poem is placed within a long narrative poem, “the lover's Elesium.” In a dream Galesia meets a youth killed in the Battle of Sedgemoor, who reports that the “fools paradice” to which he has been sent, and which Galesia is visiting in her dream, is a place where romantic love has replaced religion. Galesia decides she cannot stay in such a place, and she is taken away from it by an “angry power” who makes her climb a “stupendious mountain.” Bosvil and Galesia also contains the prophecy of the “angry power” (see p. 33), but placed in the context of the affair with Bosvil, instead of in the political and religious context of “the lover's Elesium.”

21. See Gilbert and Gubar, p. 49.

22. The earlier published version of this poem is in Poetical Recreations, Part I, pp. 38-40.

23. The earlier published version of this poem is in Poetical Recreations, Part I, pp. 12-13.

24. The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen; Design'd for the Farther Entertainment of the Ladies (London: A. Bettesworth, 1726), p. 129.

25. Delariviere Manley, “To the Author of Agnes de Castro,” in prefatory material to Catherine Trotter, Agnes de Castro, A Tragedy (London, 1696); Mary Pix, “To Mrs. Manley, upon her Tragedy called The Royal Mischief,” in prefatory material to Delariviere Manley, The Royal Mischief. A Tragedy (London, 1696).