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SISTER NOVELISTS

Devoney Looser

The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës

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. Devoney Looser is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author or editor of nine books on literature by women, including The Making of Jane Austen. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, and she's had the pleasure of talking about Austen on CNN. Looser, who has played roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen, is a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

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Book Published 2022-09-01 by Bloomsbury

Comments

For anyone interested in the challenges facing British women writers in the era of Jane Austen, Sister Novelists is essential reading... Looser's narrative approach to biography is a hybrid of accessible prose and meticulous research... SISTER NOVELISTS shows not only how difficult it was for Romantic-era women to make a living in the arts but also the remarkable privilege and entitlement of the men around those women.

Before the Brontës introduced us to Heathcliff, before Jane Austen's wit made her famous, two bestselling 'sister-novelists' captivated readers and scandalized society. Today, their names have been forgotten. But, as Devoney Looser shows in this groundbreaking biography of Maria and Jane Porter, their works and legacy are still very much with us.

Clever, compassionate, and compelling, Devoney Looser is my favorite person to read on the subject of writers. The Porter Sisters have found the perfect biographer to uncover their scandalously neglected story.

Buried for 200 years, the story of the indomitable Porter sisters comes to light. Household names in their time, these forgotten Regency novelists have gained an effective champion in Jane Austen biographer and scholar Looser.... The author sets a tale of talent, relentless hard work, and a profound sisterly bond against grueling physical privation, financial insecurity, disappointments in love, and betrayals by family... A triumph of literary detective work and storytelling, this is a must-read for the Austen and Brontë crowd.

Fans of the era's literature will appreciate the light Looser shines on these lesser-known figures.

Jane and Anna Maria Porter leap into view in Devoney Looser's brilliant joint biography. Pioneering authors of historical romance, the Porter sisters emerge as superb letters-writers, precursors of modern autofiction in their breathless, up-to-the-minute style. With such bravura riches, Looser cannily lets the sisters display in their own words their kaleidoscopic lives of romantic infatuations, glamour, poverty, and literary grind. This powerful biography delivers history through personal experience, while telling the achingly poignant story of lifelong sisterly love.

A significant step toward rescuing these Regency writers from obscurity... One of the highlights of Ms. Looser's compelling biography is her impassioned defense of her subjects' achievements... Ms. Looser skillfully expounds on the craft, artistry and intelligence that went into each book. She also recounts the real-life experience (as Jane termed it, the "living evidence") that the sisters incorporated into their pages, and provides insightful critical appraisals of each novel.