For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, a biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës.
Jane and Anna Maria Porter—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. Their literary reputation gradually fell away, their letters languished, and no biographer materialized for a century and a half. 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.
FORTHCOMING from Bloomsbury on September 6, 2022 and available for PRE-ORDER.
Jane and Anna Maria Porter—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. Their literary reputation gradually fell away, their letters languished, and no biographer materialized for a century and a half. 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.
FORTHCOMING from Bloomsbury on September 6, 2022 and available for PRE-ORDER.
I'm so grateful to have been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow, in support of this book. Here's a short video ASU put together to celebrate that support.