Jane Barker

Jane Barker (1652–1732) was a popular English fiction writer, poet, and a staunch Jacobite. She went into self-imposed exile when James II fled England during the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Her novels, The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, also published as Love Intrigues (1713), Exilius or The Banish'd Roman (1715), A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), and The Lining of the Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1726) were written after she returned to London in 1704. Prior to and during her exile, she wrote a collection of poems justifying the value of feminine education and female single life, "Poetical Recreations" (1688), and a group of political poems, "A Collection of Poems Referring to the Times" (1701), which conveyed her anxiety about the political future of England. Although not known for her letter writing, four extant letters are located in the British Library and within the Magdalen Manuscript at the Oxford Magdalen library, written between 1670 and 1688. Jane Barker was one of the first female authors to publish writings both in manuscript and print form, allowing modern scholars to study "the passage of Barker's poetry from coterie circles to larger, more impersonal communities of readers" Never married, Jane Barker died quietly in 1732. Early life Jane Barker was born in May 1652, in the village of Blatherwick, Northamptonshire, in England to Thomas Barker and Anne Connock. Anne Connock seems to be descended from an unlanded and Roman Catholic branch of the Connock family, which might explain Jane's Papist affiliation. A member of a royalist family, Jane Barker went into exile with James II once William of Orange entered England, threatening an overthrow of the outwardly Catholic James II. When Jane was 10 years old, Thomas Barker leased a property and manor in Wilsthorpe, Lincolnshire. This property was bequeathed to both Jane Barker and her mother upon her father's death in 1681 and she relocated to the property upon returning from exile in 1704. As a young woman, Jane Barker was taught Latin, anatomy, and herbal medicine by her brother, Edward, who matriculated at St. John's College, Oxford in 1668 and earned his M.A. from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1674–5. Proof of Jane Barker's knowledge of medicine can be seen in the advertisement for Dr. Barker's Famous Gout Plaister, and in her poems about anatomy found in her "Poetical Recreations".