Jane Barker’s Conversion and the Forms of Religious Experience

Though Jane Barker’s conversion to Catholicism is often noted, most critics focus on her Jacobitism rather than her specifically religious imagination. This article uses evidence from the recent publication of Barker’s “Poems Refering to the Times” to reveal previously unnoticed traces of her conversion experience in A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723). In that work, conversion appears as a fraught, potentially failed romance. Tracing the formal, thematic, and inter-textual resonances of this moment in Barker’s poetry and in her first novel, Exilius (1713), I argue that Barker depicts conversion as an equivocal process in order to challenge the emergent modern emphasis on autonomy and freedom. Religious belief is a further context, moreover, for understanding Barker’s formal innovations as a novelist. Faith’s ability to fragment consciousness provides a challenge to realistic representation. Building on work that questions the early novel’s necessary connections with realism and with secularity, I argue that Barker’s work is motivated by an effort to find literary forms to represent religious experiences that are unrealistic but not therefore fictive.