The ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the Court in Exile

The birth of an heir to King James and Mary of Modena led to a crisis, with allegations that the child was not legitimate. Whig politicians were alarmed by the promotion of openly practicing Catholics in the army and at the court. Upon the invasion by William, the court fled into exile in France, establishing a rival court at St. Germain. While in exile, Jacobite poets including Jane Barker created manuscript volumes of verse and fiction to be published later. In England, supporters of King James including Heneage and Anne Finch retreated from London into a quiet exile in the countryside, and John Dryden was removed from his post as Poet Laureate.

‘She Did but Take up Old Stories’: Generic Fluidity and Women‘s Life Writing of the Early Eighteenth Century

In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms.

Testing the Market

Like their imitators, Eliza Haywood and even Daniel Defoe have been called mercenaries who wrote to formula for low readers with limited intellects. Yet Love in Excess and Robinson Crusoe inaugurated a decade of lively, market-driven narrative experiment aimed at sophisticated gentry readers. When low scandal titillated, it originated in high life. Highly inventive, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and some authors of the many lives and surprising adventures in the Crusoe manner read their rivals with professional care. They adapted and contested as well as adopted Defoe’s distinctive fictional memoir, Haywood’s equally modern amatory sublime. So did Jonathan Swift when he parodied Robinson Crusoe’s strategies in Gulliver’s Travels, an anonymous narrative that matched its commercial triumph. Swift hastened the vogue’s end, but these novelists’ commercial and literary legacy endures.