Devoney Looser is the author of the new biography Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës. It focuses on the writers Jane and Anna Maria Porter. Looser's other books include The Making of Jane Austen. She is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and she lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of the Porter
sisters?
A: I first came across the bestselling historical novelist
Jane Porter (1775-1850) when I was writing a book on women’s literary history.
I devoted a chapter to Porter and learned this “other Jane” not only had a
birthdate very near Jane Austen’s but also that the two women’s careers had
interesting overlaps.
I discovered there was even a moment when could be mistaken
for each other! A late Victorian title page for Jane Porter’s bestselling
novel, The Scottish Chiefs (1810), describes her as the author of Pride and
Prejudice (1813).
I knew Jane Porter also had a younger sister, a more
prolific and slightly less famous novelist—Anna Maria Porter—who went by Maria
(pronounced like “Mariah”).
But it wasn’t until I started reading around in Jane and
Maria’s voluminous unpublished letters in the archives that I began to think I
might write a book about them.
The sisters exchanged beautifully written and achingly
honest letters. They were best friends who shared painful obstacles in becoming
authors, but they had opposite personalities. They seemed like real-life
precursors to Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor and Marianne Dashwood.
And the similarities didn’t stop there. Jane and Maria’s affairs
of the heart with would-be heroes struck me as fun-house mirror versions of
Austen’s plots, years before the novels were published.
I got absolutely hooked, trying to piece together the
puzzles of their lives, partially confessed in these letters. I read thousands
of them in the archives over the course of nearly 20 years. I truly hope
readers will be as captivated by these loving, brilliant, and flawed sisters as
I’ve long been.
Q: The author Lucy Worsley said of the book, “The Porter
sisters have found the perfect biographer to uncover their scandalously
neglected story.” Why do you think their story has been so neglected, and how
well known were they during their lifetimes?
A: I love that generous quote from Lucy! The neglect of the
Porters has been scandalous, but it actually took a while for them to fall out
of literary history.
By the time I learned about the Porter sisters, in the late 20th
century, the critical consensus was that they were only “minor” novelists who’d
had a couple of lucky bestsellers. It didn’t take much digging into the
evidence to conclude that was a disservice to their important innovations and
once-great reputations.
The sisters were long seen as major figures in English
literature, not only during their lifetimes but through much of the 19th
century. They published 26 books, separately and together, and achieved global
celebrity. Jane’s books sold a million copies in the US alone by the end of her
life.
In the decades after their deaths, their novels were frequently
republished, before being abridged and increasingly relegated to children’s
literature.
Through it all, the sisters had never gotten the full-length
biography they deserved. It just struck me as so unfair.
I thought someone ought to write a full account of their
lives and careers. I just didn’t think, at first, that it was a book I might
write. The task seemed daunting, with nearly 7,000 unpublished letters spread
out across the US and UK.
But the sisters’ story is just so compelling, and their
contributions to literary history so important, that I wanted to try to put an
end to the neglect.
Q: The book's subtitle notes that the Porters paved the way
for Jane Austen and the Brontës. How would you compare the Porters with Austen
and the Brontës--both in terms of their work and their lives?
A: The Porters and Austens shared many life circumstances,
which I describe in the book, but the style of their novels is quite different.
The Porters wrote historical fiction, which Austen once said she couldn’t write
from any other motive than to save her life.
So I don’t believe Austen took direct literary inspiration
from the Porters, although she must have paid attention to how this more famous
author-Jane was faring in the literary world, after daring to publish under her
real name.
Austen must also have noticed that Jane Porter’s book was
brought out by a publisher who went on to buy, but then didn’t print, her own
first work—Crosby & Co.
We don’t know very much about what Austen thought of the
Porters—little evidence survives—but the Porter sisters loved Austen’s fiction.
In the late 1820s, after Austen’s death, Jane Porter
corresponded with Charles Austen, the novelist’s younger brother. The sisters
wanted to meet him because they admired Miss Austen’s “now buried pen (alas
that it is!),” as Maria put it.
Maria went on to write a novel that was an homage to
Austen’s style in Honor O’Hara (1826), which Charles Austen read. The influence
among the Porters and Austen likely went in both directions.
The Porter sisters directly paved the way for the Brontës,
by giving them a successful model for how to market themselves as
sibling-authors—and, once the Brontës’ androgynous pseudonyms fell away, as
sister novelists.
Sometimes the Porter sisters discovered they were being
lumped together by critics as one author, mistaken identities they used to
their advantage when they could. The Porters also found they got more attention
in the popular press when they were presented as a pair. The Porters would have
been a model for the Brontës for how to charge onto the literary field more or
less in tandem.
It’s also possible the Porters inspired the Brontës, even in
childhood. The Porters, like the Brontës, wrote fantastical juvenilia together.
Anna Maria Porter actually published hers, at age 14, in 1793. The Brontës
wouldn’t publish their first works until Jane Porter’s last years of life, so
it’s not clear how much Porter knew about them.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything
that especially surprised you?
A: I was very fortunate to have gotten crucial fellowship
support for the research and writing of this book, taking me to archives in
California, Kansas, New York, as well as in the UK, in Edinburgh, Durham,
London, Bristol, and Surrey.
The three most important awards, which allowed me to
complete the book, were a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the
Humanities Public Scholar Award, and a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship.
But I had early support, too, from the three libraries with
the largest collections of Porter papers—the Huntington Library, the
Pforzheimer Collection, and the Spencer Library—and of course from my
employers, Arizona State University and the University of Missouri-Columbia.
I owe so much to those who gave me resources, time, access,
and information. In fact, I dedicated the book to “the librarians, archivists,
and collectors who preserve materials that make the stories possible.” Without
them, this book couldn’t have been written.
I’m a library rat, for sure, which means that researching
this book always had great pleasures for me.
One of the best and most surprising parts of the research
was when I was at the Surrey History Centre in Woking. Manager Julian Pooley
revealed to me that a previously unknown pencil drawing of Jane Porter had been
placed on deposit there, thanks to a private collector.
The first time I saw the portrait, it took my breath away.
It’s a casual, almost wistful image of her, from late middle age, after her
beloved sister Maria had died. I’m grateful to have been given permission to
reproduce it among the illustrations in Sister Novelists.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Unsurprisingly, I’m working on short essays that elaborate
on material from the book, to get the word out about Sister Novelists.
I’m also working with a team of ASU students on an edition
of Anna Maria Porter’s Artless Tales II (1795-96), for the Juvenilia Press.
These are fabulous stories that Maria published in her teens. We’re on track
for publication in 2023.
I’m still figuring out my next steps for a long-term
project. I’ll continue to work on Jane Austen, of course. I’m also writing a
book on roller derby, which I know will strike people as very different from
Sister Novelists!
The projects have in common a focus on shining a spotlight
on history’s strong, daring women. At least that’s how I describe it for the
tagline for my bimonthly free author newsletter, Counterpoise, where I hope
some of you might be willing to join me to remain connected to each other (https://devoney.substack.com/
).
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thanks for asking! I’m putting the finishing touches on a
companion website for Sister Novelists at sisternovelists.com (https://www.sisternovelists.com/
). You’ll find information there about how to order the book, of course—out
Oct. 25—and some teaser content about the Porter sisters’ lives and writings.
I’ve also included a gallery of extra illustrations that
aren’t otherwise found in the book’s pages. (There are 16 glorious pages of
illustrations in the book; the images on the website are what I didn’t have
room to include.) If you like to be able to envision 19th-century people and
places as you read, you’ll want to check that out.
What I’m most proud of there is the collection of 19th- and 20th-century
book covers I’ve assembled, especially of Jane Porter’s two most famous novels,
Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs.
It’s intriguing to see the ways these novels were marketed.
Some editions were designed for boys, featuring canoes, lassos, and American
Western themes, which actually have nothing to do with the content of the
novel. Other editions include cameo portraits of beautiful women. These
gorgeous copies show how just popular Jane Porter remained in the late
Victorian period.
If you have a collectible Porter edition that’s not in the
gallery, then I hope you’ll send me a photo of it (My contact information is
here: https://www.devoneylooser.com/contact.html
).
To my mind, sharing our love of books of centuries past is
yet another way, beyond reading Sister Novelists, that we might honor all that
the Porter sisters experienced, hoped for, endured, and achieved.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
