Jane Porter

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.{{Cite book |last=Sutherland |first=Virginia |editor=Otago Students of Letters |chapter=Jane Porter and the Heroic Past |title=In Her Hand: Letters of Romantic-Era British Women Writers in New Zealand Collections |date=2013 |publisher=University of Otago |location=Dunedin}}

She died in Bristol at the age of 74.{{Cite web |last=MacPherson |first=Hamish |date=9 November 2021 |title=A look into the women of the Scottish Enlightenment |url=https://www.thenational.scot/culture/19703291.look-women-scottish-enlightenment/ |access-date=2021-11-22 |website=The National |page=21 |language=en}}

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,"{{Cite journal |last=McLean |first=Thomas |title=Nobody's Argument: Jane Porter and the Historical Novel |journal=Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies |volume=7 |issue=2 |pages=88–103 |date=2007|doi=10.2979/JEM.2007.7.2.88 |doi-access=free }} though her claims in her lifetime to have done so were often ridiculed and dismissed.{{Cite web |url=https://www.whatshernamepodcast.com/jane-and-anna-maria-porter/ |title=THE SISTERS: Jane and Anna Maria Porter |last=What'sHerName and Dr. Devoney Looser |date=2018-04-02 |website=What'shername |language=en-US |access-date=2019-01-07}} Her 1810 work The Scottish Chiefs, about William Wallace, one of the earliest examples of the historical novel,"Historical novel", The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble. OUP, 1995, p. 470. was very successful. The French version was banned by Napoleon. It was said to have influenced Scott and other writers 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. 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.

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Porter wrote Thaddeus of Warsaw in 1803, set in the late 18th century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. 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.{{Cite book |last1=Looser |first1=Devoney |title=Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 |date=2010 |publisher=JHU Press |isbn=978-1-4214-0022-8 |pages=157}} She applied unsuccessfully for a literary pension, and being personally "totally destitute or nearly so", had to move between homes of her friends.{{Cite book |last1=Looser |first1=Devoney |title=Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 |date=2010 |publisher=JHU Press |isbn=978-1-4214-0022-8 |pages=159}}

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. She is sometimes associated with the 1822 production Owen, Prince of Powys, which closed after only three performances,{{Cite book |editor-last=Birch |editor-first=Dinah |title=The Oxford Companion to English Literature |publisher=Oxford University Press |date=2011}} but this was actually by Samson Penley.{{Cite ODNB |title=Porter, Jane |last=McMillan |first=Dorothy |author-link=Dorothy McMillan |id=22571}}

Porter also wrote Tales Round a Winter Hearth (1826) and Coming Out; and The Field of Forty Footsteps (1828) with her sister, Anna Maria.{{Cite encyclopedia |editor-last=McCalman |editor-first=Iain |date=2009 |title=Porter, Jane |encyclopedia=An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age |publisher=Oxford University Press}} 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.{{Cite journal |last=McLean |first=Thomas |title=Jane Porter's Later Works, 1825-1846 |journal=Harvard Library Bulletin |volume=20 |issue=2 |pages=45–62 |date=2009}}

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".{{Cite journal |last=McLean |first=Thomas |title=Jane Porter and the Wonder of Lord Byron |journal=Romanticism |volume=18 |issue=3 |pages=250–59 |date=2012|doi=10.3366/rom.2012.0096}} Additional influences on her writing included her schoolmaster George Fulton, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.{{Cite book |editor-last=Kelly |editor-first=Gary |title=Varieties of Female Gothic |volume=1 |date=2002 |publisher=Pickering & Chatto |location=London}} She in turn influenced writers in her time.

{{Reflist|30em}}

• 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, {{ISBN | 978-1-63557-529-3}}

{{Library resources box|by=yes|onlinebooksby=yes|lcheading=Porter, Jane, 1776-1850}}

• {{Cite EB1911|wstitle=Porter, Jane|volume=22|page=116}}
• {{Gutenberg author |id=1942|name=Jane Porter}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Jane Porter |sopt=t}}
• {{Librivox author |id=797}}
• {{UK National Archives ID}}
• [http://hdl.handle.net/10407/5051194575 Porter Family Collection] at the [http://spencer.lib.ku.edu/ Kenneth Spencer Research Library] at the University of Kansas
• [https://www.whatshernamepodcast.com/jane-and-anna-maria-porter/ Episode on Jane and Anna Maria Porter], with biographer [http://www.devoneylooser.com/ Devoney Looser], at What'sHerName Podcast

• [https://www.sisternovelists.com/ Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (Jane and Maria Porter) by Devoney Looser (2022)]
• [http://www.reformation.org/jane-porter-bio.html reformation.org]
• [http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/html/porter.html indiana.edu]
• [http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk/authorTitles.asp?author=656 british-fiction.cf.ac.uk]
• [https://www.whatshernamepodcast.com/jane-and-anna-maria-porter/ What'sHerName Podcast]

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Category:1775 births

Category:1850 deaths

Category:19th-century English women writers

Category:English women historical novelists

Category:Women of the Regency era

Category:Writers from Durham, England

Category:Writers of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages

Category:Writers of historical fiction set in the early modern period

Category:19th-century English novelists

Category:English women novelists

Category:English women dramatists and playwrights

Category:19th-century English dramatists and playwrights

Category:Writers from London

Category:English women non-fiction writers

Category:19th-century English non-fiction writers

Category:English women short story writers

Category:19th-century English short story writers

Category:English women poets

Category:19th-century English poets