Jane Barker was one of the first writers to make novel writing by a lady respectable. Her first published fiction appears as "Written by a Young Lady," but her later novels are signed with her name; unlike some of her successors she was not afraid to...

The daughter of Thomas and Anne Connock Barker, Jane Barker employed the pseudonyms Fidelia and Galesia in her novels, which have in recent times been discussed in critical studies of fiction and most of which have been republished in facsimile or new...

In the following essay, King and Medoff offer an account of the life of Barker that contrasts with the biography that has been erroneously reconstructed from her fictional works.

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.

In the following essay, Fitzmaurice examines the 1723 version of Barker's poem “An Invitation to my friends at Cambridge” to show that later in life the author was not as enamored of the opinions of academic men as she had been as a younger woman, because she saw the limitations of worldly knowledge and no longer felt she needed to justify her lack of formal education.