Recuperando las madres de la novelaJane Barker y la narrativa romancesca del XVIII

Zusammenfassung

In her novel The Female Quixote (1752), Charlotte Lennox advocates recovering the lost voices of the mothers of the novel. This defence includes the identification of romance and its female authors as an essential link in British literary tradition, and the acknowledgement of the impact that romance had on some of the most representative 18th-century novels. One of Lennox’s literary mothers would be Jane Barker (1652-1732). Barker, with her Galesia Trilogy,creates an intricate framed-novelle in which she patches different stories, while she reflects on the role of women as cultural creators by means of the eponymous heroine-poet, Barker’s alter-ego. This article explores Barker’s discourse on women writers and readers, on female education and feminocentric creative communities, highlighting her impact on subsequent writers and novels.