Jane Barker

Abstract

Jane Barker (bap. 1652–1732) was a poet, translator, and novelist. During her long life, Barker also occupied the roles of lay physician, political exile, Catholic convert, Jacobite polemicist, and head of an all-female household. Though Barker drew on her eventful life in verse and prose, her works are more than the sum of their autobiographical parts. She wrote poems on affairs of state, Pindaric odes, Horatian epistles, polemical dialogues, and reflections on loss and friendship. The poems she wrote while in St. Germain reflect the moral choices and shared history of those who went into exile with James II and provide a political, theological, and philosophical defense of Jacobitism, a ca..