Review | The Porter sisters’ ‘genius’ bestsellers are back in the spotlight

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Jane had to be a tough negotiator; the Porters were genteelly poor. Their father, a military surgeon, died in 1779 when Jane was 3 and Maria under a year old. Their mother supplemented a scant army pension by running a boardinghouse. Jane and Maria’s education consisted of a few years at a charity school, but both were avid readers and precocious writers. Maria’s first story collection, “Artless Tales,” was published when she was 14; it did well enough to lead the sisters to hope that their literary work could support their mother while their three brothers were in apprenticeships and school. Jane, quieter and more cautious than her lively, loquacious sister, made up for a slower start by “creating the historical novel as we know it” in her 1803 tale of a Polish war hero who becomes a refugee in England. “What was new about ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw,’ ” Looser explains, “was its mingling of climactic historical events with the conventions of biographies, romantic tales, and probable domestic novels.” Contemporary critics dubbed it “a work of genius,” and it was a sensational bestseller.

Maria, who had bounced around among fictional genres, followed Jane into historical romance with “The Hungarian Brothers” in 1807, and “The Scottish Chiefs,” Jane’s epic 1810 account of William Wallace’s struggle for independence from Britain, cemented the sisters’ reputations as the premier historical novelists of their day. Despite stardom and sales, their income rarely covered their expenses. The Porter brothers racked up debts, which their sisters often covered, and offered little financial help when their fortunes improved. Jane and Maria economized and traded on their fame by making lengthy sojourns in the homes of the wealthy patrons they cultivated. Looser makes good use of the sisters’ letters to each other during these periods to paint a sharp portrait of a class-stratified society in which social inferiors availing themselves of an aristocratic household’s amenities were expected to be at their benefactors’ beck and call.

Looser also draws on their correspondence to offer minutely detailed exegeses of Jane’s and Maria’s tortuous relationships with a parade of men who entangled them in emotionally charged friendships that promised to blossom into love and marriage but never did. How much a reader enjoys these passages depends on the level of their interest in exchanges such as Maria’s with a young painter, Thomas Kearsley, she thinks may be interested in her, as summarized by Looser from Maria’s letter to Jane:

“Then you have an affection for some people?” Maria asked.

“For many,” he said. “And I can like, and endure, a great number more.”

“Can you endure us?” [Maria] asked Kearsley, pointedly.

Kearsley looked down for a few moments at this loaded, audacious question. Suddenly, he came forward and snatched Maria’s hand.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes burning with ardor. “I can endure you!”

And so on, for three pages. On the one hand, this scene is charmingly redolent of the cult of “sensibility” that spread across Europe in Romanticism’s heyday. On the other, there are a great many such scenes, and it can be maddening to watch Maria and Jane pining after men who kept them dangling, or waffling over how they really felt about men they ultimately rejected. A little agonized soul-searching goes a long way, and Looser might profitably have made more selective use of the sisters’ atmospheric correspondence.

She is more cogent on the question of why these popular and influential authors are virtually unknown today. The root cause of the sisters’ decline in literary reputation and, eventually, sales, Looser writes, was the phenomenal success of Walter Scott’s “Waverley” in 1814 and the author’s failure to acknowledge that the methods he employed in his historical novels were very similar to the Porters’: “Critics would increasingly claim that the Waverley novels had elevated the genre of fiction — and especially historical fiction — bringing to it a superior new (masculine) excellence, while correcting supposed previous (feminine) faults.”

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Jane in particular resented this and in 1827 wrote a pointed short story, “Nobody’s Address,” that implicitly accused Scott of reducing his literary precursors to nobodies. By the time she died in 1850, having survived Maria by 18 years, Jane had been reduced to living with a brother and receiving charitable grants from the government. Her achievements deserved better recognition, and although Looser’s thickly detailed biography could stand to be a little less detailed, it pays overdue tribute to pioneering siblings unjustly neglected by literary history.

Wendy Smith is the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940.”

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