Jane Barker’s Catholic Poems: An Edition of “Poems Refering to the Times” From the Magdalen Manuscript, Part One

Introduction

The contemporary of Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker (1652-1732) is today perhaps best known for her amatory novel, The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713). Like her fellow early modern women writers, however, she experimented with a variety of forms and enjoyed a long career that was interrupted and influenced by her profound political and religious commitments—commitments that led her to follow the court of James II into exile in France, where she resided from 1689 to 1704. It was there that the poems included in this edition of “Poems Refering to the times” were written. Barker’s Jacobitism and Catholicism define much of her work after her first publication, Poetical Recreations (1688), although these allegiances appear more allusively in the prose fiction she published in the early part of the eighteenth century. However, with some notable exceptions, these crucial commitments have been downplayed in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist recovery of her work. To fully appreciate Barker’s place in literary history, she must be celebrated not just as an innovative and important woman writer but as a Catholic woman writer.

Poetical Recreations was the only volume of poetry published during her lifetime. Its fifty-three poems, available in a modern facsimile edition edited by Robert C. Evans, constitute less than half of Barker’s 118 known poems. ¹ Though Barker included additional poems in her novels, most of her poems remain in manuscript. The primary manuscript collection of her work, “Poems on several occasions,” housed at Magdalen College, Oxford, is comprised of three parts. Part one consists of twenty poems labeled “Poems Refering to the times.” Part two consists of twenty-seven poems composed “since the author was in France.” Part three contains thirty-two poems that were included in the fifty-three poems printed in Poetical Recreations though Barker complains on the Magdalen manuscript’s title page that they were “taken … without her consent.” ² Selections from the Magdalen manuscript have been published by Kathryn R. King and others, but part one is reproduced here in its entirety for the first time. ³

Part one, “Poems Refering to the times,” was designed as a gift to James Francis Edward Stuart, exiled Prince of Wales, in 1700. A second manuscript copy of part one held at the British Library as a “stand-alone” collection may have been the presentation copy for the Prince though its imperfections suggest to King that it is more likely “a prototype or a retained copy of the presentation copy” (p. 15). This copy is available to those whose academic institutions have paid for access to Gale Cengage’s British Literary Manuscripts Online. ⁴ King also notes that the more heavily annotated Magdalen manuscript of “Poems Refering to the times” became a “working book,” perhaps designed “for circulation among the St. Germain exiles or for Barker’s private use” (p. 15). It was bound separately and only later joined to the second and third parts. ⁵ The precise relation between the British Library copy and the Magdalen copy is not known. What is known is that Barker viewed the poems of part one as belonging together as a separate book. The poems speak to one another and repeat themes, particularly the seven Fidelia poems and the five poems set in hell. Although selected poems included in part two also touch on Catholic themes (such as “The Miseries of St. Germains”) or address individuals associated with the court in exile (“To Madam Fitz James”), these are primarily discrete occasional pieces. Interesting as individual poems, they lack the epic scope and thematic cohesiveness of “Poems Refering to the times.” As King observes of the poems, “Part conversion narrative, part semi-mystical Stuart propaganda, and part political jeremiad, the poems ‘Refering to the times’ comprise an outstanding example of Jacobite myth-making” (p. 21). They also explore the wrenching experience of converting to a minority faith, often through the use of dialogue. As Barker explains in her preface...