Nominally published in 1715, Jane Barker’s Exilius; or, The Banished Roman actually appeared in August 1714; the moment was historically relevant since Barker placed her work ‘on the market’ immediately after the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, and the accession of the first Hanoverian king, George I. As a Catholic and a Jacobite, Barker sympathized with the Stuart court at St. Germain-en-Laye, where she had followed King James II in 1689 and would die in 1732, and as a novelist and poet her works certainly echoed her political leanings. Exilius is constituted of seven distinct and seemingly independent narratives in which the motif of exile (either voluntarily chosen or forcibly imposed) acts as a unifying pattern that helps the reader disentangle the ‘patchwork’ of characters and plots. At the same time, such predicament is not seen as wholly negative but it is viewed as a crucible to try the exiles’ virtue. Loyalty, devotion, obligation and patience are exercised and dignified by the adventuresome young men and women engaged in the travels, shipwrecks, disguisements and agnitions that build up the narration. Thus, under the camouflage of a work of «instruction for some Ladies of Quality», Exilius celebrates those high moral standards Jacobite exiles honoured and admired in the same way as they had been exalted in the writings of King James himself, whose virtuous and long-suffering conduct may also be retraced in Barker’s characters. However, Exilius’s literary frame could hardly be appealing to eighteenth-century readers and may be labelled a belated romance in the manner of Mlle de Scudéry’s fictional works. Why therefore did Barker choose this genre? As a matter of fact, her choice of genre seems to work both as a disguise for Jacobite propaganda or maybe (and more subtly?) as the most appropriate means to celebrate the nostalgic ending of the (lost) cause of Stuart royalist ideology.
"Jane Barker's Exilius as Jacobite Fiction in Exile"
CALVI, Lisanna
2011-01-01
Abstract
Nominally published in 1715, Jane Barker’s Exilius; or, The Banished Roman actually appeared in August 1714; the moment was historically relevant since Barker placed her work ‘on the market’ immediately after the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, and the accession of the first Hanoverian king, George I. As a Catholic and a Jacobite, Barker sympathized with the Stuart court at St. Germain-en-Laye, where she had followed King James II in 1689 and would die in 1732, and as a novelist and poet her works certainly echoed her political leanings. Exilius is constituted of seven distinct and seemingly independent narratives in which the motif of exile (either voluntarily chosen or forcibly imposed) acts as a unifying pattern that helps the reader disentangle the ‘patchwork’ of characters and plots. At the same time, such predicament is not seen as wholly negative but it is viewed as a crucible to try the exiles’ virtue. Loyalty, devotion, obligation and patience are exercised and dignified by the adventuresome young men and women engaged in the travels, shipwrecks, disguisements and agnitions that build up the narration. Thus, under the camouflage of a work of «instruction for some Ladies of Quality», Exilius celebrates those high moral standards Jacobite exiles honoured and admired in the same way as they had been exalted in the writings of King James himself, whose virtuous and long-suffering conduct may also be retraced in Barker’s characters. However, Exilius’s literary frame could hardly be appealing to eighteenth-century readers and may be labelled a belated romance in the manner of Mlle de Scudéry’s fictional works. Why therefore did Barker choose this genre? As a matter of fact, her choice of genre seems to work both as a disguise for Jacobite propaganda or maybe (and more subtly?) as the most appropriate means to celebrate the nostalgic ending of the (lost) cause of Stuart royalist ideology.
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