Speaker: Devoney Looser
Organizer: Eve Kahn
Moderator: Olivia Loksing Moy

Jane Porter (1775-1840) and Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832) were the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës. The Porters, having published under their own names as teens and achieved early fame, ultimately published 26 books, separately and together. After their deaths, they gradually (and wrongly) disappeared from literary history. Devoney Looser, the author of the first biography of Jane and Anna Maria, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters: Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (Bloomsbury, 2022), will lecture on bringing the two writers back into view as innovators. Despite the success of Jane’s bestselling Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810) and Maria’s The Hungarian Brothers (1807), the Porters ultimately lost credit for inventing the modern historical novel. Once Sir Walter Scott’s Waverely (1814) burst onto the scene, the sisters were gradually overshadowed. Scott was declared the genre’s originator and never credited the Porters with inspiring his fictional method, despite having been their childhood friend. In this image-rich talk, Devoney Looser will share 20 years of archival research and beautiful 19th-century editions of the Porters’ books, presenting previously hidden stories of sisters’ lives and literary careers. The lecture will also highlight an important document held in the Grolier Club archives, showing how American publishers, having made a killing off of the novels of Jane Porter, banded together to send the elderly, impoverished author a rocking chair, rather than what she most needed—a share of their profits.

Devoney Looser's Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters: Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar Award. Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author or editor of ten other books on the history of women’s writings. Her lecture series on Jane Austen is available through The Great Courses and Audible, and she’s published essays in the Atlantic, New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, and Washington Post.