SOURCE: Williamson, Marilyn L. “Orinda's Daughters and Providence: Barker, Penelope Aubin (ca. 1685-1731), Rowe.” In Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750, pp. 244-53. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Williamson discusses Barker's novels and their themes of heroic love, parental authority about marriage, and the woman rescuer.

Jane Barker … contributed four major pieces to this fiction [of the waning of parental authority]: Love Intrigues (1713), Exilius (1715), A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), and Lining for the Patch-Work Screen (1726). Love Intrigues is the closest of her works—or any of the fiction by this group—to the Behn tradition. It is clearly written to represent a young woman's predicament as she is courted by a man who toys with her emotions, attempts to get her to agree to a hasty marriage, swears everlasting devotion and urgent desire, but then leaves her for long periods and finally...