Devoney Looser - Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës

To the librarians, archivists, and collectors who preserve materials that make the stories possible

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes

The Making of Jane Austen

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 17501850

British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 16701820

CONTENTS

I was sitting in the reading room at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, during the summer of 2004. Any scholar fortunate enough to have worked at its pristine desks knows its a beautifully silent place, save for the low-grade clacking of fingers on keyboards and the occasional clearing of a throat. In front of me there was a foldernumber 839 out of 2,662from the Jane Porter Papers. It contained a long letter written in a sharp, half-curvy hand, dated July 15, 1820. It began, Dearest Jane! and was signed, your Maria.

As I read, I found myself needing to stifle laughter. The letters pages were filled with delightfully snarky gossip. One sister was writing to another about how shed escaped alive from a boring, gluttonous dinner party hosted by neighbors. So much food was served that, as Maria put it, I was literally crammed with as many different things as there were animals in the ark. Maria decided to approach the meal like a soldier heading into battle, circumventing the meat in favor of a sophisticated attack on fine fruit.

The other guests were described with unsparing mockery. One man, she joked, must have fallen desperately in love with me, as he sat gazing either with horror or admiration at me all the time he was playing whist. Another man, choosing conversation over card games, went off like an alarum at particular words. The scene was ridiculous. Maria confessed, I longed for Miss Austins now buried pen (alas that it is!) to have immortalized the whole company.

What struck me as I read Marias words was that this letter could go head-to-head with any of the 160 or thereabouts that survive from Jane Austen. The sarcasm was dripping, the comic timing was impeccable, and the implicit social criticism was pointed. With a light touch, Maria deftly eviscerated the meal, the silly human-alarm man, and the inscrutably staring boor. No doubt he was gawking at her because she was an authoress, as celebrated women writers were called. At the time, Maria Porter was far more famous than Miss Austen, whod died just three years before and wasnt yet a household name.

I was savoring every detail in Marias letter when I was jolted back to the present. The walkie-talkie sitting on the desk in front of me buzzed. For a split second, I couldnt remember what year it was. Okay, I couldnt remember what century it was. This kind of cognitive lapse may be hard to imagine for some, but for those of us who spend countless hours in libraries reading unpublished letters by long-dead people, our work is a time-traveling excavation of lost stories. It sometimes proves difficult to dig yourself out.

The walkie-talkies buzzing required my attention. It was a signal from my husband, asking me to meet him outside the library because our infant son was crying from hunger. The buzz was noisy proof that I lived in the twenty-first century, that it was time to nurse our baby, and that the labor of a man was making possible my archival work on the history of nineteenth-century women. I could imagine what some of the writers I study might have had to say about my priorities and this unusual role reversal.

To women writers then, including the sisters whose vast correspondence I was reading, how wondrously jumbled, and impossible to pull off, would my identities as scholar, professor, writer, wife, and mother likely have seemed. The risks that Jane and Maria Porter took to publishobstacles faced, criticisms enduredhad absolutely paved the way for me and other scholars to recover their life stories. Reading their correspondence sometimes felt like voyeurism. It also felt like repaying a debt.

I began to mention these brilliant literary sisters to anyone whod listen. Few had heard of them. It sounds clichd, but I felt called to scour the Porter familys thousands of letters gathering proverbial dust on shelves. I got grants to travel to dozens of libraries. When I began to read from the sisters remarkable output of twenty-six books, I was upset to learn how theyd lost the credit theyd been given, and deserved, for creating the historical novel as we know it. Jane Porters books had sold not just thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but more than a million nineteenth-century copies in the United States alone! Why had we lost sight of her?

In the months after that walkie-talkie moment in 2004, I got pregnant again, and our second child was born. Weve now raised our two Gen Z sons almost to adulthood. But rarely has a day gone by during those chaotic years of childrearing when I havent thought about the Porter sisters. It felt so unfair that the sisters never had the benefit of a full biography, while hundreds of books on Austen and the Brontsmany with little new information to recommend themchurn from presses. I decided to do something about it.

A biography of the Porter sisters could be written as a surface-level tale, recording an impressive litany of their once-heralded literary achievements. The sisters published innovative novels that many nineteenth-century readers worshipped, although skeptics criticized these books as outlandish and improbable tales. But the fact is that the Porter sisters lives, beneath the surface, were often outlandish and improbable. Their real-life adventures read like funhouse-mirror versions of Austens famous characters and plots.

For the Porter sisters, there were few conventional happily-ever-afters. As they supported their widowed mother and three chronically disappointing brothers, the sisters fell hard for impossibly handsome and deeply flawed men. Nearly every major decision Jane and Maria made in the hope it would bring them requited love, or domestic comfort, did exactly the opposite. During the writing of this book, I had moments when I wished I could shake these brilliant sisters by the shoulders and ask, What are you doing?

But as I grasped the complex contours of their overtly polite but covertly audacious lives, I saw the Porter sisters as learned women whose judgment understandably ricocheted between wise and nave. I made the decision to center the sisters own voices in this first telling of their stories, both to honor their significant achievements and to showcase their personal strengths and faults. This centering also reflects the imaginative-meets-real world the sisters had built around themselves and inhabited together since childhooda world that propelled them to create great historical fiction. The Misses Porter were single women without fortunes whose dreams and schemes helped and hampered them by turns. They made their way together in settings where they were never meant to compete, much less to triumph.

In the following pages, Ive used the sisters private correspondence and other sources to piece together the true stories of their daily dramas as they unfolded. Jane and Maria often exchanged letters with long sections of reported dialogue, as if their lives were the stuff of plays or novels. They were so closely connected that they wrote each other long letters even when they were separated for a day or two or even if that separation was by just a few miles (as was often the case), as one sister accepted an invitation to stay overnight with nearby and more well-off friends, while the other stayed home in cramped circumstances with their widowed mother.