Sister Novelists
The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023
For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, a fascinating, insightful biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës.
Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters-exact contemporaries of Jane Austen-were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family's considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for any biographers to come.
But history hasn't been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters' works as his inspiration. With Scott's more prolific publication and even greater fame, the Porter sisters gradually fell from the pinnacle of celebrity to eventual obscurity. Now, Professor Devoney Looser, a Guggenheim fellow in English Literature, sets out to re-introduce the world to the authors who cleared the way for Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters. Capturing the Porter sisters' incredible rise, from when Anna Maria published her first book at age 14 in 1793, through to Jane's fall from the pinnacle of fame in the Victorian era, and then to the auctioning off for a pittance of the family's massive archive, Sister Novelists is a groundbreaking and enthralling biography of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Looser (The Making of Jane Austen) covers in this mostly solid survey the life and work of two "forgotten" literary sisters, Jane Porter (1776–1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1780–1832). Jane Austen's contemporaries, the two were bestselling authors in their time, publishing 30 books between them. Looser positions them as pioneers of the historical novel (a genre usually said to be created by Sir Walter Scott), shows them freely mixing in London's artistic and theatrical circles, and describes how later, burdened by their brothers' debts, Jane, Anna Maria, and their mother lived in increasing poverty. History hasn't been kind to the sisters, Looser writes: "As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, and the fame of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters grew, Jane and Maria Porter's names gradually faded out of literary histories." The author draws on their voluminous correspondence, which she calls perhaps "their greatest masterpiece," and offers plenty of insights into late-18th- and 19th-century social history. Though she's a strong writer, Looser can sometimes get caught up in the details, slowing the pace. Even so, fans of the era's literature will appreciate the light Looser shines on these lesser-known figures.
