Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript

Novelist, religious dissident, political poet, and sometime Jacobite spy, Jane Barker wrote on a remarkable variety of subjects and displayed a facility with an equally remarkable variety of genres. Most extraordinary, though, was her ability to manipulate the objects of female domesticity, an embroidered patch-work screen for example, as literary conceits to rival those of her male contemporaries. "A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies" (1723) and "The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726), both part of The Galesia Trilogy, attest to her talents; they include realistic stories and romances interspersed with poems, hymns, recipes, and religious and philosophical reflections on the turbulent social, economic, and political scene of early eighteenth-century England. Both works, when first published, achieved immense popularity. This volume reprints the entire Galesia Trilogy as well as a selection of poems from the Magdalen manuscript.