Escaping the curssed orange 
Norma Clarke
- Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725 by Kathryn King
There is a moment in Jane Barker’s 1723 novel, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, which prefigures Jane Eyre, and makes one wonder how much or how little 19th-century women like Charlotte Brontë were acquainted with their sister writers (as Barker might have put it) of this earlier period.
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Norma Clarke is the author of Dr Johnson’s Women and The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters. She teaches in the English Departmentat Kingston University in Surrey.
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