Jane Barker

JB , who wrote during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, shows remarkable daring and originality both as a poet and as a writer of prose fiction. Critical attention to her as a proto-feminist has recently been joined by attention to the political (Catholic and Jacobite) slant of her writings. From her debut as a coterie writer circulating her poems among a group of admiring male friends, JB became a denizen of the literary marketplace and a voice both for the silent elements in women's experience and for the silenced Catholic and Jacobite elements in national life.