Jane Porter
Template:Short description Template:About Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use British English Template:Infobox writer Jane Porter (3 December 1775 – 24 May 1850) was an English historical novelist, dramatist and literary figure.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> Her bestselling novels, Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810) are seen as among the earliest historical novels in a modern style and among the first to become bestsellers. They were abridged and remained popular among children well into the twentieth century.
LifeEdit
Jane Porter was born in Durham, England, the third of five children of the Irishman William Porter and Jane Blenkinsop Porter of Durham. Tall and beautiful as she grew up, young Jane Porter's grave air earned her the nickname La Penserosa after John Milton's poem Il Penseroso. After her father's death, Jane's family moved to Edinburgh, where she studied at a charity school under the schoolmaster George Fulton. Her family was acquainted with Sir Walter Scott. After stints in Durham and Ireland, the Porter family moved to London in the 1790s, where the sisters entered a circle of famous and future-famous actors, artists, and literary women, including Elizabeth Inchbald, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Selina Davenport, Elizabeth Benger and Mrs Champion de Crespigny.
Porter's siblings also achieved some fame. Her sister Anna Maria Porter was likewise a novelist. Her brother Sir Robert Ker Porter became a painter.<ref name=sutherland>Template:Cite book</ref>
She died in Bristol at the age of 74.<ref name=":0">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
WorksEdit
Porter is seen to have "crafted and pioneered many of the narrative tools most commonly associated with both the national tale and the historical novel,"<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> though her claims in her lifetime to have done so were often ridiculed and dismissed.<ref name="What'sHerName and Dr. Devoney Looser">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Her 1810 work The Scottish Chiefs, about William Wallace, one of the earliest examples of the historical novel,<ref>"Historical novel", The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble. OUP, 1995, p. 470.</ref> was very successful.<ref name=":0"/> The French version was banned by Napoleon. It was said to have influenced Scott and other writers<ref name=":0"/> and has remained popular with Scottish children. The Pastor's Fireside (1817) was a story set in the 18th century about the later members of the House of Stuart.<ref name=comp/> Though one of the most popular writers of her time, the profligacy and financial indecisions of her brothers kept her very poor, as she and Anna Maria were constantly obliged to use their incomes to pay off their brothers' debts.<ref name="What'sHerName and Dr. Devoney Looser"/>
Porter wrote Thaddeus of Warsaw in 1803, set in the late 18th century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.<ref name=":0"/> Despite its success, Porter did not benefit financially, as its copyright was held by its various publishers. To gain income from it, she resorted to ostensibly new editions published with prefaces and minor changes.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> She applied unsuccessfully for a literary pension, and being personally "totally destitute or nearly so", had to move between homes of her friends.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Porter contributed to periodicals and wrote the play Switzerland (1819), which seems to have been deliberately sabotaged by its lead, Edmund Kean, and closed after its first performance.<ref name=doro/> She is sometimes associated with the 1822 production Owen, Prince of Powys, which closed after only three performances,<ref name=comp>Template:Cite book</ref> but this was actually by Samson Penley.<ref name="doro">Template:Cite ODNB</ref>
Porter also wrote Tales Round a Winter Hearth (1826) and Coming Out; and The Field of Forty Footsteps (1828) with her sister, Anna Maria.<ref name=ox>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> A romance, Sir Edward Seaward's Diary (1831), purporting to record actual circumstances and edited by Jane, was written by her brother, Dr William Ogilvie Porter, as letters in the University of Durham Porter archives show.
In her later years, Porter continued to write pieces for journals. Many appeared anonymously or were simply signed "J. P." Her wide-ranging topics included Peter the Great, Simón Bolívar, and the African explorer Dixon Denham.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
InfluencesEdit
Porter, like many contemporaries, was fascinated by Lord Byron. The villain in The Pastor's Fireside, Duke Wharton, has been said to cast "an unmistakably Byronic shadow".<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Additional influences on her writing included her schoolmaster George Fulton, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.<ref name=sutherland /><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> She in turn influenced writers in her time.<ref name=":0"/>
ReferencesEdit
LiteratureEdit
- Devoney Looser: Sister novelists : the trailblazing Porter sisters, who paved the way for Austen and the Brontës, New York; London; Oxford; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, Template:ISBN
External linksEdit
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- Porter Family Collection at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas
- Episode on Jane and Anna Maria Porter, with biographer Devoney Looser, at What'sHerName Podcast