[In the following excerpt, Spencer claims that, throughout her work, Barker is concerned with the creation of her self-portrait as a woman and a writer.]

Like Delariviere Manley, Jane Barker presented herself as her own heroine, but a very different kind of heroine. Virginity, instead of eroticism, was the keynote of her self-portrait. Autobiographical elements take a central place in Barker's work, none of her writings being free of them, and in fact much of what is known about her life comes from her own account. Born in Wiltsthorp, Lincolnshire, in 1660, she grew up in the country and was taught Latin and medicine by her brother, whose early death had a profound effect on her. Her family was royalist in the Civil War and later supported James II. Jane Barker converted to Catholicism, and in 1689 she followed James II into exile in France. She went blind by 1700, but continued to write. It seems to have been while she was in France that she wrote the account of her early life eventually published as Love Intrigues: or the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia in 1713, some years after her return to England. Bosvil and Galesia, like the later narratives which appeared in 1723 and 1726, uses material from the poetry she wrote much earlier, some of which was published as Poetical Recreations in 1688. Barker's career covers a long period, then, but one concern remained constant throughout: the creation of her self-portrait as woman and as writer.

Barker adopted two personae in different places in her writing, Fidelia and Galesia (sometimes spelt Galecia or Galaecia). Fidelia is the name she gives herself when proclaiming her fidelity—to Jacobitism and to her chosen faith—in a number of poems extant in the manuscript ‘A Collection of Poems Refering to the Times’ (c.1700).¹ It is in the person of Galesia, though, that she examines her literary vocation. Galesia appears many times in her work—not directly in the 1688 poems, but in the praise of them written by men from Cambridge colleges, whom Jane Barker had apparently got to know through her brother. This suggests that the pseudonym was originally acquired, like Katherine Philips's Orinda, in the course of correspondence with a circle of Platonic friends. In Exilius: or, the Banished Roman, an imitation of the French heroic romance begun early in life but not published until 1715, Galesia makes a brief appearance, transformed into a princess for the occasion. In Bosvil and Galesia Galesia is both narrator and heroine. In the later narratives, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies and its sequel The Lining to the Patch-Work Screen, Galesia's story continues, interspersed with a number of fictional tales. Because all three narratives use some of the early poems and attribute them to Galesia, it is clear that Galesia in the narratives is intended as a self-portrait of Jane Barker the writer. In contrast to Aphra Behn's insistence on her descent from masculine predecessors, Barker confines her claims to a place in the tradition of Orinda. In fact her poems often seem closely modelled on Cowley's odes, but she does not mention him as her inspiration or mentor. Like most women writers of her time, she sees her work as part of a feminine tradition, and in her case she emphasizes this because of her deep fears that writing is itself an unfeminine pursuit.

In her poems and her prose Galesia always shows herself concerned about her role as a woman. She is an intellectual woman who studies Latin and medicine, she is a practising healer, and she is a poet: so she is bound to seem unwomanly to many of her contemporaries, and this worries her. On the other hand she, unlike Delariviere Manley, can lay claim to that virtue most required of women, chastity. Barker did not marry, and her Galesia narratives were written at a time when it must have been clear that she never would do. So she emphasizes her identity as virginal spinster, and uses it to defend her literary life, just as Manley laid stress on her own sexual experience in order to portray herself as the writer Rivella.

In her Galesia narratives Barker not only provides herself with a romantic pseudonym, but wraps her life story in the conventions of romance. The first-person narrative of Bosvil and Galesia is prefaced by a short framing account, signed ‘J. B.’, introducing Galesia and the friend, Lucasia, who is supposed to be listening to her story. In A Patch-Work Screen and The Lining, Galesia is referred to in the third person, though within the narrative of A Patch-Work Screen Galesia tells her own story to a lady she meets. In each of these last two works there is an introduction signed by Jane Barker, who claims to have met Galesia. Thus Barker distances herself from her persona, freeing ‘Galesia’ to be like a heroine of romance. By transforming the autobiographical story she has to tell into the life of a romance-like heroine, she is able to claim that Galesia's story is significant and to justify Galesia's actions according to romance convention. Turning her own life story into what she calls a ‘diverting Novel’,² she is offering her public the kind of work it wants; and she is also protecting herself and liberating her imagination.

The first of the narratives, Bosvil and Galesia, is the story of a failed courtship, told by Galesia to Lucasia years after the event. As a young girl, Galesia loves her cousin Bosvil and believes he loves her, but her maidenly decorum and his erratic behaviour—veering from enthusiastic devotion to cold indifference—prevent them from reaching an understanding, and eventually he marries another woman. Galesia's narrative is a subtle variation on an important theme in eighteenth-century narration—seduction, which, whether the heroine suffers or avoids it, is nearly always central to her story.³ In fact Bosvil neither seduces nor attempts to seduce Galesia, but the idea of seduction haunts her and provides her with a way of interpreting his enigmatic behaviour. Is his clandestine and interrupted courtship a sign that he is unsure of his own feelings, or of hers; or does it indicate a plan to seduce her? As she recreates and analyses her youthful experiences in narrative, Galesia is unable to decide.

Galesia accuses herself of a heroine's pride: flattered during her youth, she thinks herself a ‘goddess’ to her lover, like a heroine of romance. She keeps Bosvil at a distance, and her haughty behaviour, which makes him think she cannot love him, is one explanation offered for the failure of their relationship. On the other hand, her narrative shows that behind a heroine's pride lies vulnerability. She has to conceal her feelings because if a woman should ‘betray [her] Weakness by a too ready Compliance’ with even an honourable proposal, her purity might be questioned (Bosvil and Galesia, pp. 21-2). A young girl's reserve towards her suitor is made necessary by the society she lives in: ‘as the World now rolls, we are under a Kind of Constraint to follow its Byass’ (p. 10). The way the world rolls is implicitly criticized in the narrative. The young Galesia acted like a proper heroine in being proud and punctilious; yet this helped to deprive her of the virtuous heroine's proper destiny, marriage.

Galesia's story, ending in neither of the usual alternatives—‘ruin’ or marriage—open to the eighteenth-century heroine, seems an oddity to those who do not take the autobiographical nature of the narrative into account.⁴ Barker has superimposed the literary convention of the heroine's social and sexual initiation onto the story of her own single life, attributing to herself as ‘Galesia’ the characteristics of heroines whose destiny she does not share, in order to make the single life a new kind of heroine's destiny.

On the surface, Galesia's narrative is an explanation of her failure to marry; but underlying this is a tale of success, when the thwarted heroine of romance becomes a poet.

During the first of Bosvil's recurrent periods of coldness towards her, Galesia composes verses dedicating 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)⁵

The choice she is offered is clear: the hope of married life or the promise of literary achievement. By inscribing the verses on the tree as the muses suggest, Galesia has taken their offer: henceforth she (like so many women writers of her time) will try to emulate Orinda.

Here, then, is an alternative explanation for the heroinely pride that kept the lovers apart. Galesia actually preferred to remain unmarried and dedicate herself to poetry. Her other ambition, to be a healer, is mentioned immediately afterwards and linked to the literary aspirations in her description of herself as ‘Apollo's Darling Daughter’, Apollo being god of poetry and of medicine (p. 15). The sarcastic tone here expresses Galesia's typical uncertainty about the value of the choice she has made. On the one hand, she describes her intellectual life as merely a 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). On the other hand, her readiness to make vows to the muses contrasts with her care never to promise anything to her lover, and even when her thoughts are in ‘a Sea of Joy’ at the thought of marrying Bosvil soon, her choice of poetry haunts her. In a dream she is made to climb a high mountain, evidently the poet's mountain, Parnassus, and she is warned by a mysterious ‘angry Power’ that:

Since, since thou hast the Muses chose,
Hymen and Fortune are thy Foes.

(p. 33)

The opposition between poetry and love is intensified in the second edition of Bosvil and Galesia, in which, when Galesia climbs the mountain, Bosvil attempts to ‘tumble [her] down’, but is prevented by the angry power.⁶ The sexual implication in this encounter befits Galesia's identification of poetry with chastity, and it suggests that the young Galesia's apparently unwarranted fears that Bosvil will try to seduce her arise from her unacknowledged dread that, if he marries her, he will seduce her away from her literary vocation.

Barker's later narratives continue to develop the picture of Galesia established here. The speaker of most of A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies is Galesia after her return from France. She tells the story of her life after Bosvil's desertion, which contains further struggles between poetry and marriage. 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.(7)

Galesia's praise of Orinda is mixed with typical self-mockery, but there is a sense of pride in having embraced the fate of a poet, whatever the effects on the rest of her life.

In A Patch-Work Screen Galesia's commitment to poetry and the single life is opposed by her mother, who tells her that marriage is ‘the Business for which [she] came into the world’ (p. 80). Fortunately, however, Galesia's numerous suitors justify her rejection of them by their evident unworthiness, and they soon disappear from the scene. One is hanged for robbery and another, who has led a profligate life, shoots himself. Galesia's rejection of sexual involvement receives further support from the reported experiences of the women she meets, including one who is suffering from a venereal disease after being seduced, and another who, marrying according to her father's wishes, was reduced to poverty and misery. Dutiful marriage and illicit sexuality seem equally to carry danger, and Galesia understandably celebrates ‘A Virgin Life’ in one of her poems, which explicitly links virginity 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)

Galesia's verse opposes the common belief that to be a woman writer suggests sexual looseness. Not that Galesia receives any such accusation herself: it is her dedication to virginity that worries her mother. Nevertheless the continual insistence on the chastity of poetry in Barker's work suggests that the sexual reputation of some women writers disturbs her. One incident in A Patch-Work Screen seems to be an expression of her fears that poetry will unleash the dangers of sexuality. 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). 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 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)

On one occasion, though, Galesia's thoughts are interrupted by ‘a hasty Knocking on the Door of the Leads’ (p. 73). She opens the door to find a distressed young woman, Belinda, whose story is a familiar one in eighteenth-century narrative: she has been seduced and abandoned, and is pregnant. She was fleeing across the roof-tops of London to avoid the parish officers when she found Galesia's garret. After this Galesia's mother forbids her to use her garret closet, in case, Galesia explains, she should ‘encounter more Adventures, not only like this, but perhaps more pernicious’ (p. 78). Galesia cannot find an innocent poetic retreat without having her peace shattered by the appearance of a seduced woman, and it seems that her intellectual interests, however pure in themselves, carry with them the danger of contact with impurity.

In A Patch-Work Screen Galesia is surrounded by various arguments against her vocation, but her bitter feeling 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 by the attitude of the lady to whom she relates the story. This appreciative listener praises Galesia's verses, and allays her fears that her writing is an unfeminine activity. She is working on a patch-work ‘most curiously compos'd of rich Silks, and Silver and Gold Brocades: The whole Furniture was completed excepting a SCREEN’ (Introduction, sig. a5r-a5v). Galesia is invited to contribute to this typically feminine endeavour, but her unconventional life has left her with no silks or brocades to offer. They open her trunks and boxes, but ‘alas! they found nothing but Pieces of Romances, Poems, Love-Letters, and the like’ (sig. a5v). However, the lady is happy to accept these pieces of writing as Galesia's version of silk patches, and it is from them that the screen is composed. Galesia's story of her writing career is thus 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. She looks to the past for her inspiration, finding a lamentable moral decay in the literature of the present.

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.⁸

Praise is given, as usual, to Katherine Philips, long dead by this time, and not to any woman writing in the eighteenth century. 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). Part of Cowley's poem ‘Upon Mrs. K. Philips her Poems’ is recited by ‘a Bard’ (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 tributes to the poet she admires are over; and that she herself has failed in her ambition to ‘reach fair ORINDA's Height’.

Jane Barker's allegiance may have been to the past, but her autobiographical narratives point to plots of the future. In her romance, Exilius, she concludes conventionally with the marriages of numerous pairs of lovers, but in the Galesia narratives her focus on her own life leads her to modify literary conventions. Various literary heroines contributed to the creation of Galesia, but the plots of fiction offered her no conclusion satisfactory to her author. While other writers were just beginning to experiment with the novel as the story of the heroine's journey to identity through marriage, Jane Barker was already offering an alternative pattern for the novel, with the creation of an unmarried heroine who achieves her identity through study, the practice of medicine, and writing.

Jane Barker, like Delariviere Manley, defined her authorial position by suggesting connections between her own character and situation and the kind of writing she produced. While Manley argued from her sexual life to her sexy writing, Jane Barker linked her virgin life to her pure and moral work. Manley's self-portrait encouraged others to adopt her image, whereas Barker, never so well-known a writer, was less influential in herself.⁹ Yet she is the one who represents the winning side in the eighteenth-century debate about the woman writer. Choosing the famously pure Katherine Philips for her model, she rejected the other precursor with whom Philips had previously been associated—Aphra Behn. In A Patch-Work Screen, Galesia reports that a lady she met, ‘asked me, if I lik'd Mrs. Philips, 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 Manley, Pix and Trotter in the 1690s. Whereas they saw both Philips and Behn as shining examples of the woman writer's power, Barker could only acknowledge Sappho and the chaste Orinda as her models, even though Behn's novels probably provided some material for her narratives.¹⁰

Jane Barker was never a best-selling novelist, but her Galesia narratives and Exilius did provide something for her support when she was spending her later years in England on a small income.¹¹ She was one of the earliest women novelists to unite the mercenary motive of the professional writer with a prominent display of the ‘chaste Verse … chaster Thoughts’ associated with the leisured poetess; so she has a significant place in the history of women's writing. Her work, unlike Behn's and Manley's, would always remain respectable even to the later eighteenth-century reader. Her Galesia narratives give a fascinating picture of a woman wanting to be accepted as a writer, explaining what is unconventional about her life, anxiously insisting on her own purity. In her self-portrait we begin to see hints of something that will be much in evidence in the writing of other eighteenth-century women: the cost of becoming acceptable.

Notes

1. The MS ‘A Collection of Poems Refering to the Times’ is in the British Library (Add. MS 21,621). Another MS copy of these poems comprises the first part of a three-part MS volume of Jane Barker's poems in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford (MS 343). The second part of this contains some unpublished poems, and some which are printed (with alterations) in her later narratives. The third part is a revised version of the poems published as Poetical Recreations: Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, &c. With Several New Translations (London: Benjamin Crayle, 1688).

2. See Love Intrigues: Or, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (London: E. Curll and C. Crownfield, 1713), p. 2. The title page of both first and second editions of this work call it a novel.

3. Miller, The Heroine's Text, Readings in the French and English Novel 1722-1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 4.

4. Patricia M. Spacks writes that ‘One might expect A Patch-Work Screen to bring its heroine to a more satisfactory conclusion [than the one in the earlier narrative], educating her to achieve happiness in wedlock … Galesia never manages to marry, the book ends in medias res … 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. 66-7.

5. This poem is found in ‘part the second’ of Magdalen MS 343, 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 the volume.

6. The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, As related to Lucasia in St. Germain's Garden. A Novel, 2nd edn, corrected (London: A. Bettesworth and E. Curll, 1719), p. 29.

7. A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (London: E. Curll and T. Payne, 1723), p. 3.

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

9. Some success for Barker's narratives may be inferred from the appearance of second editions of Bosvil and Galesia and Exilius together as The Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker in 1719, and the further edition of Entertaining Novels in 1736. Barker's name, however, rarely if ever appears in eighteenth-century discussions of the novel, while Manley's and Haywood's appear very frequently.

10. One of the interpolated stories in The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen appears to be modelled on Behn's The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1689). See W. H. McBurney, ‘Edmund Curll, Mrs. Jane Barker, and the English Novel’, PQ 37 (1958), pp. 385-99.

11. Jane Barker is mentioned in a 1715 list of Roman Catholic nonjurors as holding an estate of £47-10s. annual value: see G. S. Gibbons, ‘Mrs. Jane Barker’, Notes and Queries ser. XI, no. 12 (1922), p. 278. Presumably she also benefited from the patronage of the Countess of Exeter, to whom she dedicated Exilius.