SOURCE: "Galesia, Jane Barker, and a Coming to Authorship," in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, edited by Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 91-106.

In the following essay, King examines what A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies reveals concerning Barker's anxieties about the public's reception of her writing.

I

The story told by the poet and novelist Jane Barker, in three autobiographical narratives about her struggle to fashion an identity as a writing woman, is inevitably a study in ambivalence. It is impossible that a woman coming to writing in England in the 1670s and 1680s would not be anxious about her own acts of authorship. But it is hardly surprising that such a woman, talented and stubbornly intelligent, living in relative isolation in rural Lincolnshire, would turn to writing as a way of maintaining...