SOURCE: King, Kathryn R. Introduction to The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript, pp. 1-23. Oxford: Magdalen College, 1998.

In the following essay, King claims that the Magdalen manuscript of Barker's poems is particularly important for the glimpse it affords into Barker's writing life and her evolution as a artist; for the light it sheds on seventeenth-century English Catholicism, early Jacobitism, spiritual autobiography, and women's writing; and for the oppositions it discloses between public/private and political/domestic in writings about politics and affairs of state.

The Magdalen Manuscript and Its Significance

One of the most important, and intriguing, figures to emerge in the current recovery of early women writers is Jane Barker (1652-1732), of Wilsthorpe, Lincolnshire. Barker was the author of three partly autobiographical novels (1713-26) and a politically encoded romance (1715), as well as a translation of a long devotional work by Fénelon (1718); and she led...