SOURCE: "Jane Barker, Political Recreations, and the Sociable Text," in ELH, Vol. 61, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 551-70.

In the essay that follows, King explores Barker's participation in a complex literary community that also included men.

In Writing Women's Literary History (1993), Margaret Ezell argues forcefully for a rethinking of the assumptions that govern feminist literary history.¹ Feminist historiography, she contends, derives its models of female authorship from nineteenth-century practices; these models distort our understanding of the circumstances and modes of production of women writers of earlier eras. In the narratives generated by such a historiography early modern women writers are constructed as isolated eccentrics at odds with themselves and their culture; their story is the recurring one of exclusion and absence, of female voices silenced and female talents repressed. Not only does such a story misread women's past; it also invites continued misreadings. To focus on exclusion is to encourage...