Jane Barker and the Politics of Catholic Celibacy
Jane Barker's amatory novel, Love Intrigues (1713), presents a snapshot of English Jacobite Catholic culture at James II's exiled Court in St. Germain-en-Laye. As evidenced in her Galesia Trilogy and poetry, Barker's narratives promote Catholic monasticism and its advantages for English women such as retreat, education, and the preservation of a feminist history. That the 1719 edition of Love Intrigues minimizes these overt Catholic emphases suggests that Barker's representation of Royalist Catholic solidarity in the first edition was too controversial later, due to recent and imminent Jacobite activity in England.
Wicked Traders, Deserving Peddlers, and Virtuous Smugglers: The Counter-Economy of Jane Barker's Jacobite Novel
A manuscript-circulated coterie poetess, then a (long-forgotten) pioneer in the rise of the English novel, Jacobite author Jane Barker witnessed with distrust and distaste the rise of businessmen and tradespeople in early eighteenth-century British society. Standing at the crossroads between the two worlds and world-pictures of the Jacobite court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Hanoverian Britain, deeply concerned with, and personally affected by, the material difficulties of the daily survival of Jacobite partisans, she simultaneously expressed and fostered the uneasiness of the men and women of the landed gentry faced with the change from a status- to a class-based society in her later novels. To this end, she created a variety of sharply delineated, often contradictory "trading" figures vested with symbolic and political significance. Halfway between observation and allegorization, novelistic characterization provided Barker with a way to negotiate a difficult adaptation to the unsparing historical necessity—the dual political and economic revolution—which had upset both her status as a poet of the elite and the political and religious order to which she still adhered.
The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
"A brilliant, original, and powerful book. . . . This is the most skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism that I know of." So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about "The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer," Mary Poovey's study of the struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the modest, self-effacing "proper lady." Interpreting novels, letters, journals, and political tracts in the context of cultural strictures, Poovey makes an important contribution to English social and literary history and to feminist theory. "The proper lady was a handy concept for a developing bourgeois patriarchy, since it deprived women of worldly power, relegating them to a sanctified domestic sphere that, in complex ways, nourished and sustained the harsh 'real' world of men. With care and subtle intelligence, Poovey examines this 'guardian and nemesis of the female self' through the ways it is implicated in the style and strategies of three very different writers."-Rachel M. Brownstein, "The Nation" ""The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer" is a model of . . . creative discovery, providing a well-researched, illuminating history of women writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. [Poovey] creates sociologically and psychologically persuasive accounts of the writers: Wollstonecraft, who could never fully transcend the ideology of propriety she attacked; Shelley, who gradually assumed a mask of feminine propriety in her social and literary styles; and Austen, who was neither as critical of propriety as Wollstonecraft nor as accepting as Shelley ultimately became."-Deborah Kaplan, "Novel "