BIOGRAPHY

King, Kathryn R. Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, 263 p.

The only full-fledged biography of Barker, emphasizing her writing life—her literary friendships, readers and readerships, relations with men in the book trade, and dialogue with literary conventions.

CRITICISM

Gibbons, G. S. “Mrs Jane Barker.” Notes and Queries 12th Series, no. 33 (30 September 1922): 278.

Brief biography and description of the Magdalen manuscript of Barker's poems.

King, Kathryn R. “Of Needles and Pens and Women's Work.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 14 (spring 1995): 77-93.

Discusses the metonymic needles and pens in Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House.

———. “Jane Barker, Mary Leapor and a Chain of Very Odd Contingencies.” English Language Notes 33 (March 1996): 14-27.

Examines the poem “Catharina's Cave,” attributed to John Newton and adapted and preserved by the working-class poet Mary Leapor, which the author says has a great deal to tell readers about Barker's virginal self-image.

Medoff, Jeslyn. “Dryden, Jane Barker, and the ‘Fireworks’ on the Night of the Battle of Sedgemore (1685).” Notes & Queries 35 (June 1988): 175-76.

Observes that phrases in poems by Barker and John Dryden indicate that the two described the same phenomenon.

Shiner Wilson, Carol. Introduction to The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson, pp. xv-xliv. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Reconstructs Barker's life from a variety of contemporary records and emphasizes the way Barker's works have forced scholars to rethink literary history by shedding new light on eighteenth-century authorship, political identity, sexuality, the literary marketplace, and social class.

Additional coverage of Barker's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 131; Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 42