Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text

In Writing Women’s Literary History (1993), Margaret Ezell argues forcefully for a rethinking of the assumptions that govern feminist literary history. ¹ Feminist historiography, she contends, derives its models of female authorship from nineteenth-century practices; these models distort our understanding of the circumstances and modes of production of women writers of earlier eras. In the narratives generated by such a historiography early modern women writers are constructed as isolated eccentrics at odds with themselves and their culture; their story is the recurring one of exclusion and absence, of female voices silenced and female talents repressed. Not only does such a story misread women’s past; it also invites continued misreadings. To focus on exclusion is to encourage contemplation of the forces that have thwarted female literary production and to summon up yet more evidence of the silenced (alienated, isolated) woman writer — when what is needed is a great deal more in the way of basic information about the texts, contexts, and situations of early women writers.

The present essay seeks to characterize some features of the early verse and circumstances of Jane Barker (1652–1727?), focusing on poems written in the 1670s and 1680s and printed in Poetical Recreations (1688). ² Barker, an important figure in the emergence of the novel in the early decades of the eighteenth century, is best known for the trilogy of autobiographical fictions she published between 1713 and 1726, the second of which, A Patch-work Screen for the Ladies (1723), attracts admiring notice from feminist critics and literary historians. ³ But long before Barker began fashioning her quirky narratives of the self, she composed occasional verse and, like other country gentlewomen, exchanged poems and other pieces of writing with relatives and friends. Late in 1687 (1688 is the date on the title page) more than fifty pieces of what appear to be largely coterie verse were printed without Barker’s authorization as part 1 of the two-part Poetical Recreations. This body of verse makes available for study an obscure manuscript circle that included, in addition to Jane Barker, several Cambridge students. ⁴ My research into Barker and the young men who formed her circle, praised her poetry, and sponsored its passage into print calls into question the assumption of much feminist criticism that women writers of the early-modern era struggled into print against a tide of male hostility and derision; it also suggests that sociability is a more important feature of early women’s verse than much feminist scholarship, preoccupied with themes of personal isolation and cultural exclusion, has permitted us to see. ⁵ My own focus on the sociable dimensions of Barker’s verse aims to promote a richer and more exact understanding of the place of women writers in their immediate social setting and in relation to the larger culture.

I

Poetical Recreations appeared late in 1687 to little acclaim. ⁶ Roughly the first third of the volume — fifty-one poems on 109 octavo pages — consists of verse by Jane Barker. The remainder consists of poems written by “Gentlemen of the UNIVERSITIES, and Others,” as the title page has it. Barker’s contributions include Pindaric odes, ballads and songs, verse epistles, meditative lyrics, elegies. Of likely interest to readers today are those that directly engage gender issues (“A VIRGIN LIFE,” “An Invitation to my Friends at Cambridge,” “To Ovid’s Heroines in his Epistles “), and those on the poetic vocation (“Necessity of Fate,” “To the Importunate ADDRESS of POETRY,” “Resolved never to Versifie more “) and on medicine (“On the Apothecary’s Filing my Bills amongst the Doctors” and “A Farewell to POETRY, WITH A Long Digression on ANATOMY.”) Part 2 includes a scattering of poems to and about Jane Barker but consists mostly of unrelated verse by a number of men, many unidentified. Largely forgotten today — Charles Cotton and “Sir C. S.” (Sir Charles Sedley) are the biggest names in the group — they appear to have been an uncelebrated lot even in their own time. ⁷

Because many of Barker’s poems bear traces of their coterie origins, it is easy to see that...