SOURCE: Spencer, Jane. “Jane Barker.” In The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, pp. 62-70. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Spencer claims that, throughout her work, Barker is concerned with the creation of her self-portrait as a woman and a writer.

Like Delariviere Manley, Jane Barker presented herself as her own heroine, but a very different kind of heroine. Virginity, instead of eroticism, was the keynote of her self-portrait. Autobiographical elements take a central place in Barker's work, none of her writings being free of them, and in fact much of what is known about her life comes from her own account. Born in Wiltsthorp, Lincolnshire, in 1660, she grew up in the country and was taught Latin and medicine by her brother, whose early death had a profound effect on her. Her family was royalist in the Civil War and later...