KING, Kathryn R.

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Emory University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, University of Montevallo, Comer Hall, Station 6420, Montevallo, AL 35115. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL, associate professor of English language and literature.

AWARDS, HONORS: Folger Institute joint fellowship award, 1992-94.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Thomas Hardy, Wessex Tales, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor) The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript, Magdalen College (Oxford, England), 1998.

Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career, 1675-1725, Clarendon Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor, with Alexander Pettit) Eliza Fowler Haywood, The Female Spectator, Pickering & Chatto (London, England), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Kathryn R. King is an academician and writer. In 1991 she served as editor of a new edition of Wessex Tales, a collection of nineteenth-century writer Thomas Hardy's short stories set in rural England. In a review of the volume for English Studies, Michael Thorpe, while contending that King's notes are "inflated," conceded that they are also "useful and reliable on historical background, folklore and Dorset speech."

The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript, another publication on which King served as editor, presents verse by the English writer whose political beliefs caused her to temporarily leave her country in 1689. The volume is divided into three sections: poems related to Barker's conversion to Roman Catholicism and her considerations of the Jacobite cause, poems Barker produced during her self-imposed exile as a Jacobite sympathizer, and poems she revised following their publication in the collection Poetical Recreations. Jane Spencer affirmed in Review of English Studies that "King does an excellent job of explaining the three-part manuscript," and Victoria Burke observed in Notes and Queries that "King has respected the integrity of the manuscript volume."

King is also the author of Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career, 1675-1725, which Clare Pettitt, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, proclaimed "fascinating." Another critic, Norma Clarke, wrote in the London Review of Books that Jane Barker, Exile "isn't so much a biography of Barker as 'the biography of a remarkable literary career.'"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

English Studies, April, 1993, Michael Thorpe, review of Wessex Tales, pp. 201-204.

London Review of Books, April 5, 2001, Norma Clarke, "Escaping the Curssed Orange," pp. 24-25.

Notes and Queries, June, 2000, Victoria Burke, review of The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript, pp. 251-252.

Review of English Studies, November, 2001, Jane Spencer, review of The Poems of Jane Barker, pp. 583-584.

Times Literary Supplement, April 6, 2001, Clare Pettitt, "Room of Her Own," p. 5.*