Jane Barker Research Articles

Dueling Discourses: The Erotics of Female Friendship in Mary Pix's Queen Catharine

Dueling Discourses:The Erotics of Female Friendship in Mary Pix's Queen Catharine Dawn M. Goode To be free, I have no taste of those insipid dry discourses, with which our sex of force must entertain themselves, apart from men. We may affect endearments to each other, profess eternal friendships, and seem to dote like lovers; but 'tis not in our natures long to persevere. Love will resume his empire in our breasts, and every heart, or soon or late, receive and readmit him as its lawful tyrant. (Congreve, The Way of the World, II, 23-30)1 The above excerpt from William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) reveals several of the ideologies surrounding female romantic friendship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In an effort to persuade the wife of her lover that she is a true and loyal friend, Mrs. Marwood freely (if oxymoronically) assesses women's friendships as affected, temporary, and doomed for sacrifice upon the altar of hetero-romantic love. Admitting that she has "no taste" for conversations between women that are not male-centered, Mrs. Marwood voices the belief that women, restricted from an active participation in the affairs of the greater world, have nothing to offer each other beyond "insipid dry discourses" that hold little importance or interest for anyone. Mrs. Marwood's rejection of female intimacy's inherent value, along with the noted hypocrisy of her own behavior, reminds Congreve's audience of the long-held cultural belief that women were incapable of the sacrifice, loyalty, and passion necessary for real amitie, and as a consequence could never achieve the ideal of male heroic friendship. The fact that this assessment comes from the disingenuous and morally bereft Mrs. Marwood, however, testifies to the [End Page 37] presence of a counter-rhetoric that identified such relationships as emotionally and spiritually equal, if not superior, to heterosexual relationships. The cultural cachet achieved by female romantic friendships by the time of The Way of the World is most commonly linked to the mid-seventeenth-century poetics of Katherine Philips. Known by her contemporaries as "the Matchless Orinda," Philips claimed for women the classical and Renaissance model of male friendship in which same-sex friendship was believed to offer emotional and spiritual intimacy superior to heterosexual love. In such poems as "To my dearest Lucasia" and "Orinda to Lucasia," Philips valorized female friendship as a platonic ideal, a "meeting of the souls." Building on Philips' language of intense sentiment and passion, later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century poets such as Lady Mary Chudleigh, Aphra Behn, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch continued celebrating female friendship, a celebration that became a staple of the eighteenth century novel.2 Prior to its much-documented place in the novel and its satirized turn in Congreve's comedy, however, female romantic friendship made its most notable appearance on the stage in the tragedies of Catharine Trotter and Mary Pix. The concurrent rise of the she-tragedy genre and the influx of female playwrights in the late seventeenth-century theater ensured a greater emphasis on female characters that revealed "a much richer conception of the character of woman" than had previously existed (Kendall, Love and Thunder 11). Pix's tragedies, Queen Catharine (1698) and The Double Distress (1701), and two of Catharine Trotter's tragedies, Agnes de Castro (1696) and The Unhappy Penitent (1701) all highlight the female romantic friendship as part of this "richer" conceptualization of the character and lives of women.3 Of these plays, it is Trotter's Agnes de Castro that provides the most idealized rendering of female romantic friendship.4 It is Pix's Queen Catharine, however, that corresponds more closely to the attitudes and values of the late Restoration theater audience. In fact, Queen Catharine, Or, The Ruines of Love can be read as the blueprint for Mrs. Marwood's pointed critique of female friendships.5 Effectively, Mrs. Marwood's speech (and Congreve's overall commentary on female friendship) is little more than a succinct rendering of Pix's more sustained assessment in the earlier Queen Catharine. For while Anne Kelley correctly states that the play is "about male power...

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.

Jane Barker, Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate and 'Solomons Wise Daughter'

Dated New Year's Day 1700, Jane Barker's poem ‘To Her Royal Highness the Princess Lewis Marya, Princess of Bavaria […]’ addresses the (German) Stuart Princess who was Abbess of the Royal Cistercian Abbey of Maubuisson. Barker's poem reflects her interest in female monasticism and echoes a conventional line of Jacobite compliment regarding the Stuarts’ readiness to exchange temporal for spiritual crowns. In comparing the royal nun with ‘Solomon[’]s wise daughter’—a mysterious allusion that seems to relate to a passage in i Kings 4—Barker may be invoking a now forgotten tradition among the English Benedictine nuns of Pontoise, with whom the poet was on friendly terms. Thomas Fuller's Pisgah-Sight of Palestine is an alternative, or complementary, possible source.

Novel beginnings: experiments in eighteenth-century English fiction

In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans a clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history--by no means inexorable--might have taken quite a different course.

Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 by Ruth Perry

315 ner that, when all belief is in question, carries ethical import. Kant trumps Plato. Mr. Donoghue has organized his project around a series of couplings— Richardson and Pope, Sterne and Laclos, Diderot-as-philosopher and Diderot-asnoveliest , Radcliffe, Godwin, and Goethe , and Charles Brockden Brown and Sade—that are as productive as they are odd. While Pope implicitly and Richardson explicitly ‘‘bestow a surprising degree of legitimacy’’on human artifice for its moral and transformative potential, Sterne cannot, for all his efforts, discover in sensibility ‘‘anything apart from the purely earthbound’’ because it is inseparable from its foundation in ‘‘a materialist philosophy’’; Yorick is famously left at the conclusion of A Sentimental Journey with a handful of the Fille de Chambre’s —the uncertainty tellingly tied, Mr. Donoghue suggests, to a decidedly physical moment of ‘‘feeling.’’ Diderot, we are told, replaces Richardson as his model with Sterne largely because his devotion to philosophical skepticism salted the ground necessary to cultivate realistic fiction; the ‘‘disorderly quality of Diderot ’s novelistic discourse,’’ praised by postmodern critics for ‘‘mirroring the dissonance of the world,’’ is better seen as a ‘‘dissonance between form-giving and his materialist philosophy.’’ The examples and the argument grow with each chapter. In the ‘‘curiously stereophonic effect’’of Radcliffe’s treatment of the real and the unreal in her novels (where, however titularly supernatural the events they witness, readers always end in Northanger Abbey); in the violently sensible ‘‘little monster’’ Werther; in the theatrical factitiousness of Sade’s ‘‘sexual tableaux’’—in each case, and despite enormous and important variations , literary realism stands opposite, not alongside, skeptical materialism. And thus the title fits exactly, for it is Mr. Donoghue’s constant, provocative thesis: ‘‘the discourse of the novel’’—realistic fiction—enlightens. E. Derek Taylor Longwood University RUTH PERRY. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 466. $80. Ms. Perry argues that the concept of ‘‘family’’ and kinship obligations underwent drastic transformations as the primacy of blood relationships gave way to an axis of conjugality. Through casestudy based chapters of particular sets of relationships, she fleshes out the practical and psychological impacts. For instance , as sons were freed (or burdened) to accumulate capital and maximize economic opportunities, daughters sometimes became beggars, actually homeless people shuttled to relatives or friends as dependents vulnerable to being treated worse than servants. At every point she factors in such major forces as changes in economic systems, print culture, population growth, and urbanization, and most valuably brings together the best and most pertinent research in social history , cultural anthropology, psychology, and law. Brief comparisons to kinship practices in India, Nepal, and other places sometimes reveal the crass practices of English families. Ms. Perry knows this literature well and rightly pauses to inform the reader of controversies within , for example, interpretations of the Hardwicke Marriage Act. She is not shy about taking stands. She concludes that the Act was a key moment in the history of the family and unflinchingly records 316 her own judgment: ‘‘Concerned with legal contracts for the transfer of property rather than social relations between humans , the . . . Act constructed men’s and women’s rights as equal. . . . Ignoring the very real difference between men and women in social consequences for sexual experience . . . the Hardwicke Act created the need for the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes.’’ To some specialists, Ms. Perry tells a familiar story. In a variety of ways, women were better off in 1700 than in 1760. One of the epigraphs for her Introduction describes ‘‘the wreckage of families’’ in Austen’s novels as ‘‘unnerving’’ and in novels by other women as ‘‘appalling.’’ The first chapter is titled ‘‘The Great Disinheritance,’’ by which Ms. Perry means the psychological as well as legal and economic disinheritance of daughters , and the two chapters on marriage chronicle the Foucauldian pressures that confined not only what women could do but what they could assert their natures to be. From the valued and even indulged daughters in Jane Barker’s and Mary Davys ’ fiction, English novels came to Clarissa, epitome of what Ms. Perry describes as the new position of daughters in the family: ‘‘temporary...

Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550-1714 (review)

Reviewed by: Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550-1714 Dosia Reichardt Andreadis, Harriette, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550-1714 (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001; paper; pp. xiii, 254; 9 b/w illustrations; RRP US$17; ISBN 02260200096. This study deals with the literary construction of female homosexuality in the period from 1550 to the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In the introductory chapter it is made clear that the book covers literary rather than historical practice. English female writers are discussed in depth, but the book also covers continental and classical influences on writers and readers. Professor Andreadis does not limit herself to the accounts of transgressive behaviour in conventional literary texts but includes travel narratives, anatomies, conduct books and other vernacular publications. The most interesting period, from the point of view of different configurations of erotic relationships, turns out to have been the mid-seventeenth century. By then, discourse about same-sex behaviour was becoming inhibited and existing literary forms, such as pastoral, were reshaped to provide a sort of coded vehicle for the expression of feelings that would not excite opprobrium. Here I was hoping to find out more about cross-dressing (women with cropped hair openly wearing swords) and other transgressive behaviours; vignettes of social life sometimes referred to in the poetry of the drolleries. The author's aim is to restore the complexity defining same-sex relations in the early-modern period, but principally from the female point of view. Katherine [End Page 188] Philips is an obvious choice of subject and an analysis of her work takes up a substantial portion of chapter 3. The poems receive a fresh and detailed critique and Andreadis points out that Philip's relationships with other women were becoming understood as liminal, especially when reference was made to Sappho. Indeed the discussion about the reception and rewriting of Sappho via Ovid, and in a male tradition, which forms the subject of the second chapter is perhaps the most interesting section of the book. Linguistic evidence is provided and the evolution of terms such as tribade and fricatrice is examined for their ideological freight. Stephen Orgel in his essay 'Jonson and the Amazons' cites Jonson's usage of the adjective for female homosexuality as the earliest recorded. In Epicoene, Jonson sends Venus to invent new sports with the Graces calling them 'thy tribade trio'. Although the author traces how myths about tribadism became enshrined in drama, romance and poetry she does not include this reference. She does, however, cast new light on the classical influences on English literature at this time through her analysis of the way Ovid's fictional rewriting of Sappho's sexual activities in the Heroïdes gained credibility and authority. The same-sex erotics available to those who could read Latin were gradually suppressed in vernacular literature considered suitable reading for the 'proper lady'. Katherine Philips set a precedent in the homosocial environment of her time, but by the mid-eighteenth century explicitly transgressive discourse had been split from a charged but shadowy language that would lead to the development of a language of female romantic friendship based on virtue and chastity. Andreadis's history of ideas also embraces other late seventeenth-century writers: Anne Killigrew, Anne Finch, and Jane Barker, thus providing an interesting background for students of Jane Austen. The book adds to studies of Early Modern subjectivity from a new perspective which deserved expansion in an introductory chapter. As it stands, there is a very short preface and some statement of theoretical intent in Chapter I where Andreadis positions herself among other scholars who have either evaded (Faderman) or promoted (Castle) a recovery of same-sex literary perspective. For anyone interested in pre-Romantic women's writing and in the way a male culture has shaped its production and reception, this book is a welcome addition to the critical work accumulating on previously marginalized authors. There are a few diverting illustrations and an excellent bibliography. Dosia Reichardt English James Cook University Copyright © 2005 the author

Pope to Burney, 1714–1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings by Moyra Haslett

124 Mr. Rogers’s envelopment of the poem in sources, so that the interpretation itself of a source may approach a property of the poem, reminds me of E. R. Wasserman , whose chapter in the Subtler Language (1959) enjoys repeated endorsement , although Mr. Rogers never endorses its reduction of the poem (and most everything else Pope wrote) to concordia discors. If Pope is a ‘‘Renaissance poet,’’ on the other hand, he does not always seem to know what a symbolism is to do. It is odd that the ‘‘heraldic language ’’ that Mr. Rogers ‘‘translates’’ out of the poem operates as a symbolism if it is ‘‘not so much another level of meaning as an alternative system of signification ’’ redundant of what Pope says ‘‘in the poem by other means.’’ The politics of the poem are still not much beyond Wasserman’s own elaboration of J. R. Moore. ‘‘The whole dialectic of WindsorForest ,’’ as Mr. Rogers has it, ‘‘is organized around the notion of an evil Williamite interregnum jeopardizing true British virtues, as embodied by the Stuart family, and reviving some of the horrors of the interregnum.’’ Mr. Rogers’s emphasis on the artistic tests tolerances between old Turks and young fogies among Scriblerians. No exquisite contradictions in ideology are turned up; no theory intervenes; the word ‘‘Foucault’’does not appear. There is also little attention to genre, the one issue that divides through all critical persuasions. He is suggestive about the artistic, as in accounting for some of the color imagery through locutions of heraldry, and can be no lesssuggestiveinwhatmightleadonly to a resemblance. For instance, he says of the poem ‘‘most of its main descriptive terms can be found on any small-scale map of this district.’’Perhaps not just any map. One of the activities of the retired man is that he ‘‘O’er figur’d Worlds now travels with his Eye,’’ and traveling in a map, regarding theimageastheareaitself depicted there, is a topos since Ariosto. So what could be the implications of such a resemblance of appellativesfromafamily of early maps, of a use of a map space in the sequence of description or narration in the poem (as occurs with the maps of Poly-Olbion)? There is much to go on from with Mr. Rogers’s positioning of the poeminanimperialsensibilitythatwould ironically set aside the policy of another aging queen. Richard Eversole University of Kansas MOYRA HASLETT. Pope to Burney,1714– 1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xviii ⫹ 240. $75; $24.95 (paper). To unify the 65 years covered in Pope to Burney, Ms. Haslett invokes the‘‘dominant idea’’ of conversation, which she earnestly asserts is ‘‘not in any sense a single label.’’ With Jürgen Habermas as both hero and villain of the piece, Ms. Haslett treads the familiar ground of public and private spheres. She treads surefootedly , however, and she does venture forth to emphasize the role of women writers. She considers literal conversations —beginning with a history of literary clubs and coteries—and figurative dialogues—including real and fictional epistolary exchanges, as well as ‘‘print conversations’’ surrounding Grub Street practices—which bring a wide array of texts into her purview. Ranging through periodicals, poetry, correspondence, and the appropriation of these by the novel, she conveys the dynamic evolution of eighteenth-century literature and a sense of conversation between and among writ- 125 ers and readers. Her main targets are Habermas and Ian Watt, and she iterates, with minor elaboration, the feminist and Marxist cases against both. She argues that privacy is publicly performed, and thus complicates the division of spheres and the traditional placement of women. Ms. Haslett’s attention to women writers is valuable. By examining how women shaped public discourse by both their absence and their presence, she conveys a more vibrant picture of eighteenthcentury life, literary and otherwise, than conventional representations have sometimes done. In addition toherinterpolated readings of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), Leapor’s poetry, and others, an entire chapter is devoted to ‘‘Female Communities.’’In this, she discusses Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), as examples of...

Representing Modernity in Jane Barker's Galesia Trilogy : Jacobite Allegory and the Patch-Work Aesthetic

Representing Modernity in Jane Barker's Galesia Trilogy : Jacobite Allegory and the Patch-Work Aesthetic

Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 ed. by George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker

81 ally there’’ to the tautological assertion that lesbian literary history should be understood ‘‘in conjunction with history.’’ The final two eighteenth-century essays of the volume, both concerned with the specifics of writing eighteenthcentury literary histories of women, draw respectively on the completed ongoing projects of their authors: Antonia Forster and James Raven’s, English Novels, 1770–1829 (2000) and Susan Staves’s Longman’s History of Women’s Writing. Ms. Forster describes how her amassing of bibliographical information from searches of contemporaryadvertisements and reviews gives a fullersenseofwomen novelists’ careers than was previously possible through the ESTC. Ms. Staves’s ‘‘Terminus a Quo, Terminus ad Quem: Chronological Boundaries in a Literary History’’respondsdirectlytothedeclared aims of the volume’s Introduction with her rigorous theoretical grounding of literary history as a distinct genre. From the summary historiography of predecessor works, she concludes that chronology offers the most useful organizing principle for such an exercise. While the terms of her inquiry have been set by theLongman series’ designated subject of women’s writing, and she is consequently released from the need to question closely this categorical restriction, she nevertheless demonstrates as convincingly as the other contributors to the volume, the advantages of feminists’ readings that are ‘‘less narcissistically obsessed with the sufferings of women and more broadly intellectually engaged with significant literary and political debates of the day.’’ As with the essays contributed by Ms. Schellenberg, Ms. Hobby, and Ms. King, the turn here from apologetics or exceptionalismtodetailed contextual explorations of women ’s writing advances both the refiguring of feminist criticism and, more largely, of literary history as a workable category of inquiry. April London University of Ottawa Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England , 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker. Cambridge: Cambridge , 2002. $60. In his Introduction to this elegant volume of essays, Mr. Justice draws our attention to the parallels between the early modern period in which manuscript publication existed alongside emergent print technologies and our own world in which print practices share cultural space with emergent technologies of digitalization and internet publication. Acknowledging and building on the foundational work of scholars like Margaret Ezell (who also has an essay in this volume), Messrs. Justice and Tinker and the volume’s contributors ‘‘argue for a broader conception of the practice of authorship’’ than that commonly understood in a print-centered literary history. In order fully to understand the ways in which information is, was, or will be distributed and assimilated , we must ‘‘look at manuscript culture as a persisting set of procedures with its own history and customs as well as balancing manuscript and print as unfinished , in-process cultures with strong cross-fertilization.’’ These essays challenge the opinion that early women writers resorted to scribal rather than print publication out of modesty or fear for their reputations. Manuscript circulation had its own set of rules and its own advantages, such as the greater control of circulation and audience , and freedom to engage intellectu- 82 ally with controversial matters aired to a select and discriminating readership of like-minded people. In fact, some of the essays, like Isobel Grundy’s, consider manuscript publication as an avenue for creative expression. The young Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Ms. Grundy argues , participated in a coterie manuscript culture in pursuit of ‘‘mental independence and imaginative self-realization.’’ Leigh Eicke and Margaret Ezell are interested in the way women writers allude to or reveal the practices of manuscript publication in their printed works. Ms. Ezell argues that posthumous print publications can be examined for the purpose of ‘‘reconstructing and reanimating a long-deceased literary landscape’’ that included a vibrant manuscript culture, while Ms. Eicke discusses the way Jane Barker’snovels ‘‘bothcelebrateandresist the world of print’’by paying equal homage to the worlds of scribal and print publication . Collectively, the essays deepen and broaden our sense of women’s options , rather than restrictions, as to how, why, and to whom to write. To read this volume, essay by essay, is to come across signposts pointing in directions for future commentary. In ‘‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Tactical Use ofPrint and Manuscript,’’ Kathryn King writes, ‘‘one of the most insistent...

:Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800

List of illustrations Note on contributors Acknowledgements 1. Introduction George L. Justice 2. The Countess of Pembroke's agency in print and scribal culture Margaret P. Hannay 3. Circulating the Sidney-Pembroke psalter Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon 4. Creating female authorship in the early seventeenth century: Ben Jonson and Lady Mary Wroth Michael G. Brennan 5. Medium and meaning in the manuscripts of Anne, Lady Southwell Victoria E. Burke 6. The posthumous publication of women's manuscripts and the history of authorship Margaret J. M. Ezell 7. Jane Barker's Jacobite writings Leigh A. Eicke 8. Elizabeth Singer Rowe's tactical use of print and manuscript Kathryn R. King 9. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her daughter: the changing use of manuscripts Isobel Grundy 10. Suppression and censorship in late manuscript culture: Frances Burney's unperformed The Witlings George L. Justice Bibliography Index.

Jane barker, exile: a literary career, 1675-1725

Jane barker, exile: a literary career, 1675-1725

A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing ed. by Anita Pacheco

56 epic, that with Gay’s second series of fables (1738), singleness of address, as opposed to ambiguity, became ‘‘the main characteristic of orthodox verse fable until the end of the century,’’that across the century it moved away from themes of power to those of interaction and relationship . To all these ideas, which Mr. Loveridge tends to toss off as casual asides rather than reasoned arguments, one is tempted to say, maybe yes, and maybe no. The genre as Mr. Loveridge conceives it is sufficiently amorphous to accommodate nearly any historical generalization . Mr. Loveridge does a more useful service when he attempts to provide a poetics ; this entails what he calls the ‘‘double capacity’’ of fables, their tendency to provide one level of meaning for the superficial reader, another for the more sophisticated , which means fables canseem to endorse a system of order, yet subvert it. Armed with this idea, Mr. Loveridge analyzes a wide range of material, including Aesop and La Fontaine in their many manifestations, Ogilby, Mandeville , and Gay, as well as a miscellaneous assortment of parables, beast stories, allegories , moral exempla that appear in everything fromplaysandnovelstoSpectator papers and anecdotes. At times the analyses are perceptive, but at times, unintelligible , and the emphasis on doubleness too often results in producing expanding sets of paradoxes that can lead to skewed interpretations. Swift’s poems, for example, turn out to be so multilayered with doublenessthattheyendupambiguous and self-contradictory, and Dryden ’s ‘‘Hind and the Panther’’ is so riddled with paradox that it makes a case both for and against Catholicism, which would have surprised Dryden. One has to wonder whether doubleness constitutes a genuine poetics for fable or merely an organizing device for handling intractable material. Much of what Mr. Loveridge says about the political innuendo in fables , of their power to subvert, of their habit of saying one thing while meaning another, could be said of satire. Think Gulliver’s Travels or A Modest Proposal. But then again, satire is presumably a subset of fables, and we are back to the basic problem of a genre too unstable and vast to describe. I do not believe Mr. Loveridge ever gets close to his professed goal, although he provides interesting insights along the way. Cedric D. Reverand II University of Wyoming A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. xx ⫹ 391. $104.99. This volume provides a ‘‘studentoriented ’’guide to the literary, social, and cultural history of women’s writing from 1550 to 1700; it is therefore of limitedbut far from negligible value for students of literature in the period beginning in 1660. The book is divided into four parts: I ‘‘Contexts,’’II‘‘Readings,’’III‘‘Genres,’’ IV ‘‘Issues and Debates.’’ Part One contains chapters on education, religion,law, work, and writing. Most of these are concerned mainly with the Renaissance and have only marginal relevance to the post1660 period. The chapter on ‘‘Women and Writing’’ by Margaret J. Ezell is an exception. In an essay notable for itswide range of reference, conciseness, and critical acumen, she surveys women’s writing up to the end of the seventeenth century and previews developments after 1700. Part Two, ‘‘Readings,’’ allots separate chapters to each of ‘‘the best known and most frequently studied’’ women writers 57 of the period. The danger or benefit of thus lending support to the formation of a ‘‘canon’’ of women writers is an issue that appears not to worry the editor. The familiar names from1660–1700 arehere: Cavendish, Philips, Behn, and Astell. Many late seventeenth-century women besides these four, however, also appear in the book. Part Three, ‘‘Genres,’’allows room for briefer treatment of a considerable number of writers from the later period: Mary Rich, Anne Halkett, and Agnes Beaumont under ‘‘Autobiography ’’; Bathsua Makin, Sarah Fyge Egerton , Mary Lee (Lady Chudleigh), and others, under ‘‘Defences of Women ’’; Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, Egerton again, and ‘‘Ephelia’’under‘‘Women ’s Poetry’’; Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Mary Delarivier Manley under ‘‘Drama.’’ Among absences or under -representations are Anne Bradstreet (brief references only) and Lucy Hutchinson (no discussion of her translation of Lucretius).AnneFinchmakesafewfleeting appearances but is evidently regarded as too late for...

Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 (review)

BOOK NOTES ancestors came from Aquitaine, boldly asserts a role in the first lines. The poem must create its own context and generate its own energy, and one way is through the shifts in grammatical mood that Strauss points out—from the declarative, to the imperative, to the interrogative, and back to the declarative in each of the four successive stanzas ofthe sonnet. Since the poem has been associated with Eliot for many readers, it is interesting to know that Paul Eluard once owned a manuscript version. One can only speculate on the ways in which other poets may have reacted to it—for instance Rimbaud and Hart Crane. At any rate, Strauss has made a literary hero ofNerval, and by his account the poet effectively challenged the great metaphysical void ofhis time, preparing the way for other poets and theorists. Celso de OliveiraUniversity ofSouth Carolina JOSEPHINE DONOVAN. Women and the Rise ofthe Novel, 1405-1726. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. xiii + 176pp. In A Room ofOne 's Own, Virginia Woolfnotes that "books continue each other," and Josephine Donovan's extraordinary work shows that ideas do the same thing. Relying on Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin's theories about the novel and Ian Watt's seminal 7%e Rise ofthe Novel, Donovan has added an important text to the evergrowing canon on the history and formation ofthe novel. Donovan's contribution is particularly significant because she concentrates on the contribution ofwomen writers to the evolution ofthe novel genre, an approach that departs from the work that has been done on women as consumers ofthe novel. Donovan also challenges those theorists and historians ofthe novel who have previously located women's literary production within the context ofthe sentimentalist tradition. Rather than present a comprehensive survey, the author focuses her analysis primarily on women writers whom she places within the realist tradition, and thus she has chosen Christine de Pizan, Marguerite de Navarre, Maria de Zayas, Margaret Cavendish, Delarivier Manley, Mary Davys, and Jane Barker for her primary attention. Donovan's goal is "to chart the degrees by which Western women's literary silence was broken" (146). Concentration on these women enables her to show succinctly yet thoroughly how the writers' use of both the framed-novelle genre and casuistry contributed to the creation of"particularized literary characters, thereby introducing one of the novel's most unique features" (5). In addition, the emphasis on individual cases is shown to foster the notion ofthe novel as a form of ethical knowledge which Donovan calls "the most defining attribute ofthe novel" (5). Donovan argues that the women writers under discussion affirm female agency and subjectivity through modes ofcritical irony, satire, non-Latinate rhetoric, indirect discourse, and "an attitude of ureverent realism" (ix). These modes, in turn, have been recognized by Bakhtin as constitutive ofthe novel's essentially subversive character. Donovan's arguments are elegantly presented in nine chapters, each having a different focus; the author always returns, however, to the same primary material, which is interpreted according to the particular context ofthe chapter. This method makes Women and the Rise ofthe Novel very readable and accessible to a large audience, because Donovan states her thesis and gives helpful and relevant plot summaries at the same time. In addition, this method makes the book a good candidate for supplementary use in appropriate college or university courses. While Vol. 25 (2001): 190 ??? COHPAnATTST individual chapters advance the overall premise, they are also discrete units, which could be assigned reading to accompany class lectures and discussions. Donovan's book remains lively and erudite from beginning to end. The author quotes all primary material in English, but she also provides the original French, Spanish, or Italian. Her secondary sources include Margaret Doody, Gérard Genette , Lucien Goldmann, Hegel, Domna Stanton, and many others whom the reader can access swiftly through an index. Donovan's main source, to which the book's title alludes, is Ian Watt. She often refers to the "dean ofauthorities on the 'rise ofthe novel'" and expands Watt's ideas by showing how the framed-novelle, a genre that he overlooked, is in fact a progenitor ofthe realist novel (73). Donovan traces the beginnings ofthe...

Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career, 1675-1725

Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career, 1675-1725

Tactile places: Materializing desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker

Tactile places: Materializing desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker Edited by CAROL SHINER WILSON Pp XIVII+332, (Women Writers in English 1350-1850) New York and Oxford Oxford University Press, 1997 Cloth, £30, paper, £16 REBECCA MILLS REBECCA MILLS Christ ChruchOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume 50, Issue 197, February 1999, Pages 103–104, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/50.197.103 Published: 01 February 1999

English women's poetry, 1649-1714: politics, community, and linguistic authority

Introduction PART 1: ORIGINS English and Continental Origins: Queens, Heroes, Prophets Women's Community and the Exiled King: Katherine Philip's Society of Friendship Eros, Myth, and Monarchy in Aphra Behn PART II: ELABORATIONS The Female Monarch and the Woman Poet: Mary of Modena, Anne Killigrew and Jane Barker Queen Anne among the Poets Anne Finch: Gender, Politics, and Myths of the Private Self CONCLUSION Appendices Order of poems in Katherine Philip's manuscripts and Poems Lucasia poems in approximate order of events described Anne Killigrew's paintings John Chatwin's 'To the Pious Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew. A Pindarique'. Order of poems in Jane Barker, Political recreations (1688) Order of poems in Magdalen College MS. 343, Barker's 'Poems on Several Occasions, in 3 Parts' 'An Elegy on the Death of K. James'. Notes Bibliography Index

Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text

Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text

Creating the Woman Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker

Creating the Woman Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker

Mrs. Jane Barker

Mrs. Jane Barker