Barry was always described as being a plain woman. Portraits suggest intelligence but heavy features and the playwright Thomas Shadwell writes in a letter in 1692 that it would have been better to have staged Nicholas Brady's "The Rape" in Roman dress, "and then w'th a Mantle to have covered her hips Mrs Barry would have acted ye part." Apparently, none of this mattered to contemporaries. Even though Barry was "the ugliest Woman" in the world off stage, wrote an anonymous author in "A Comparison Between the Two Stages" (1702), she was "the finest Woman in the World upon the Stage."