SOURCE: Spencer, Jane. “Creating the Women Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2, no. 2 (fall 1983): 165-81.

In the following essay, Spencer claims that Barker's main concerns were to define herself as a woman and as a writer and to create for herself and her audience an acceptable self-image. Spencer also states that Barker's works are especially important to those interested in the history of women's writing and women's self-definition because they seem to be largely autobiographical.

To some extent, the autobiographer's problem with the meaning of the self is shared by all writers. “For all literary artists,” write Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “self-definition necessarily precedes self-assertion”; and the problems of self-definition have been particularly acute for the female artist, as their study of nineteenth-century women writers demonstrates.¹ If women had difficulty in defining themselves as writers in the nineteenth century when there...