SOURCE: King, Kathryn R. “A Jacobite Novelist.” In Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725, pp. 147-79. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

In the following essay, King tells the story of Barker as a Jacobite novelist, showing the connections between the plots of her novels and the political activities and ideologies of the Stuart court.

Barker is in fact a supremely self-regarding writer, mindful of her gendered singularity and fascinated with the many ways to tell her own story; and it seems undeniable, if hard to prove, that her heroine, Galesia—poet, healer, virgin, femme savante, and odd woman—is in many ways a self-portrait. However, when the complex self-fashionings of the prose fictions, the Galesia trilogy in particular,¹ are read in relation to their own political moment, these narratives emerge as complex elegiac responses to the declining fortunes of the exiled Stuarts and their followers in England.²

That Barker's...