Robert C. Evans
Ashgate
Hardback
426
Jane Barker (1652?1732) is increasingly being recognised as one of the most important English women writers of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. The author of both poems and novels (including novels containing numerous poems) Barker was largely ignored for many years but has recently been the subject of intense interest and investigation. Despite this no complete collected edition of Barker's poems has yet appeared and the present volume is the first reproduction of her important early published volume Poetical Recreations to be issued in facsimile as a printed book (rather than on microfilm). Jane Barker's life was rich in incident. Her early poetry was enthusiastically advocated by the male students at St. John's College Cambridge. A persecuted Catholic and a subsequent longtime exiled supporter of the Jacobite cause in France following the 'Bloodless Revolution' she was also physically disabled and without great financial means in part because she never married. Almost certainly her decision to begin publishing novels was motivated on some level by financial need. By the time she died in March 1732 at the age of seventy-nine she had lived a life that had been long eventful and accomplished but by no means easy.
Ashgate
Hardback
426
Jane Barker (1652?1732) is increasingly being recognised as one of the most important English women writers of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. The author of both poems and novels (including novels containing numerous poems) Barker was largely ignored for many years but has recently been the subject of intense interest and investigation. Despite this no complete collected edition of Barker's poems has yet appeared and the present volume is the first reproduction of her important early published volume Poetical Recreations to be issued in facsimile as a printed book (rather than on microfilm). Jane Barker's life was rich in incident. Her early poetry was enthusiastically advocated by the male students at St. John's College Cambridge. A persecuted Catholic and a subsequent longtime exiled supporter of the Jacobite cause in France following the 'Bloodless Revolution' she was also physically disabled and without great financial means in part because she never married. Almost certainly her decision to begin publishing novels was motivated on some level by financial need. By the time she died in March 1732 at the age of seventy-nine she had lived a life that had been long eventful and accomplished but by no means easy.