Lost Ladies of Lit
Lost Ladies of Lit
HIATUS ENCORE: Jane and Anna Maria Porter with Devoney Looser
HIATUS ENCORE: Sisters Jane and Anna Maria Porters’ books took Regency-era England by storm just a few years ahead of Jane Austen, and their lives were chock-full of fascinating (and insufferable) characters, intriguing romantic escapades, event-filled interludes at the homes of wealthy acquaintances and desperate gambits to stay one step ahead of the poverty line. Joining us is ASU Regents Professor of English, Devoney Looser, whose new book is Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontes. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a triumph of literary detective work.”
Discussed in this episode:
Artless Tales by Anna Maria Porter
Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter
The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter
The Hungarian Brothers by Anna Maria Porter
“The End of the English Major” (The New Yorker, 2/27/2023)
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KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes.
AMY HELMES: Hey everyone. A few years ago we introduced you all to a pair of Scottish sisters, Jane and Mary Findlater, who were born in the 1860s and became quite the literary sensations.
KIM: In today's episode, we're going to rewind to a century before the Findlaters to another set of sister novelists with ties to Scotland. Jane and Anna Maria Porter's books took Regency-era England by storm just a few years ahead of Jane Austen.
AMY: And like a Jane Austen novel, the Porter sisters' lives were chock full of fascinating and insufferable characters, intriguing romantic escapades, event- filled interludes at the homes of wealthy acquaintances, and desperate gambits to stay one step ahead of the poverty line.
KIM: The Porter sisters were known for their innovative historical novels, and one could argue that they paved the way for writers who followed, like Sir Walter Scott.
AMY: One could also argue that Sir Walter Scott basically ripped them off and never gave them any credit.
KIM: Them's fightin' words, Amy.
AMY: Well, like Jane Porter's hero, William Wallace (yes, the same guy Mel Gibson would portray in Braveheart almost 200 years later) I'm not afraid to go to battle for the reputation of these talented literary sisters.
KIM: Okay, well our guest today, biographer Devoney Looser, can probably help lead the charge then. She wrote the book on the Porter sisters. So let's raid the stacks and get started.
[intro music plays]
KIM: Today's guest, Devoney Looser, is Regents professor of English at Arizona State University. She's written and edited a number of books on literature by women, including The Making of Jane Austen, The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes, and The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic Period . Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon and The Times Literary Supplement. Maybe we should also mention that she was interviewed in The New Yorker on the um, English major article that everyone is talking about right now.
AMY: Oh yeah, for sure.
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: Her most recent book is Sister Novelists, the Trailblazing Porter Sisters who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontes. Kirkus reviews, calls it "a triumph of literary detective work." Smithsonian Magazine calls it "a triumphant and moving biography," and our very favorite British historian, Lucy Worsley, dubs it "clever, compassionate, and compelling." Also, the "Bonnets at Dawn" podcast, which we love, named this book in their Best Reads of 2022 episode, so everyone's vouching for it, you guys.
KIM: When her head's not buried in books, you can find Devoney skating roller derby under the badass moniker of Stone Cold Jane Austen. Oh my God, so cool. She's also faculty advisor to the ASU co-ed rollerblading team, the Derby Devils, and once starred as herself in a never -released low budget Jane Austen roller derby vampire movie Vampyra.
AMY: I don't have a clue why this movie is not available on every streaming service right now. Who do we have to contact in Hollywood to get some distribution lined up? I can picture the whole thing in my head, but Devoney Looser, welcome to the show.
DEVONEY LOOSER: So great to be here, Amy and Kim, and I love the work that you're doing on Lost Ladies of Lit. It is crucial, and I just feel so honored to be a part of this conversation.
AMY: Well we're honored to have you. So let's dive into the Porter sisters. Jane Porter was born in 1775 and Anna Maria, it's Maria, right?
DEVONEY: Absolutely. She rhymed it with “fi-ah!”
KIM: Yep. I love that you've had that in the book. Yeah, that was great.
AMY: And she was simply known as Maria to her family, she was born three years later. In total, there were five surviving children in the family, including a brother Robert, who was born in between the two sisters and with whom the sisters shared a special bond all their lives. Their story begins in Durham, England, which I loved reading about in this biography, Devoney, because I visited Durham, so I could picture it all very well. And you were so specific in it, in fact, that I was able to go on Google Maps and look at those cross streets, where the house was located, where the inn was located. So that was fun. But tell us all about their childhood and how it kind of shaped the writers they would become.
DEVONEY: So their father died almost immediately when Maria was still an infant, under difficult circumstances. He was an army surgeon and he had significant health decline, leaving his wife a widow with five children under the age of eight and no money. And so this shaped obviously all the things that were possible for them. Their mother ended up running boarding houses, which was not an odd choice for her because her father, the Porter sisters' grandfather, had run a tavern and an inn. So she kind of knew how this stuff worked. And, uh, she took the three youngest children with her from Durham to Edinburgh. So the three youngest grew up mostly in those two cities until they headed to London. And I know we'll talk about that in a minute, but they didn't have much of an education. They had only charity school education in Edinburgh with their brother, Robert. I just think it's so amazing that two of the women who would go on to become the most famous writers of their generation started with so little. They were really very self-made in terms of their intellect.
KIM: So the sisters started getting published very early on as teenagers, basically, which is really interesting. They didn't really have insta-success, did they?
DEVONEY: No, not really. Although it was the younger sister, Anna Maria, who first burst onto the literary scene in the 1790s. She published this first book called Artless Tales at age 14 in 1793. The family was already in London. It was their brother Robert, who was then a budding artist, soon to become a famous artist and studying at the Royal Academy, uh, you know, they got really well connected into the art and literary context and exciting people in 1790s London. And Anna Maria had this chance to publish this book by subscription, which means they took advantage of every wealthy and famous person they knew. So that means that this was basically like a crowdfunded book. They made money off of people expecting that they would get a copy and get their name inside the book later, and she put her name on the title page. So Anna Maria was the first to break out as a writer. At the same time, the critical establishment was not so sure that this was something a teenage girl should be doing. She got very high-level reviews. They noticed her book at the highest levels, but the reviews, as I described in the book, were often quite cruel in telling her things like, "Stop publishing. You've come too soon with the fruits of your imagination," you know, “You're not yet ripe" and, you know, all sorts of really gross imaginings of what it meant for her to pluck this fruit of her intellect. Uh, but yeah, she took a lot of really harsh criticism and kept writing, which I also just think is so resilient and so amazing. Also it was done, I think, out of financial necessity in a way. She didn't have a choice but to ignore the critics.
KIM: Yeah, to be able to go up against that, even when you really need to, is, is very admirable. So let's talk a little bit more about their personalities. Um, I kept thinking of the Dashwood sisters when I was reading about Jane and Maria. Jane seems a little bit more like Elinor, you know, pragmatic, measured, and a little bit more reluctant to own her feelings. Whereas Maria was this passionate, impulsive person like Maryanne.
DEVONEY: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, I do make the comparison there, too. But they also had friends who compared them to John Milton's poems, “L'allegra” and “Il Penserosa.” So again, the lively versus the more melancholy. And they seem to imagine each other in these terms too. Uh, but it is really moving to me to imagine them as Elinor and Maryanne Dashwood.
KIM: You really made me picture them just walking into a drawing room or something and like everyone going, “Oh, those are the authoresses.” People start to know who they are and they're in this fascinating milieu of artists and writers, so…
AMY: And they were gorgeous!
KIM: Yeah. And they're gorgeous. Oh yeah, exactly.
DEVONEY: It certainly didn't hurt them that they were beautiful, especially because their brother was in the art world. They sat as models for a lot of his artist friends. So we do have some images of them and we know that, at least in a couple cases, very famous artists were absolutely struck by the beauty of these sisters. And then when they turned out to be smart, too. Oh my God, right?
KIM: Yeah. Completely.
AMY: Yeah. So given the fact that they're so gorgeous and charming, it's interesting that both sisters never married. But they definitely had suitors for much of their life. And as teenagers, it sounds like that house was just always chock full of lively young men. You know, it sounded like a fun house to be in.
KIM: Yeah.
DEVONEY: I think so. And their mother, I mean, their mother to me is a kind of heroine of this story, too. The widowed Mrs. Porter, she didn't put a lot of constraints on her children, especially these three younger children. She let them get up to all sorts of things that we wouldn't normally think of as being okay. They had a lot of freedom, socially, and their house, which was very modest, turned into a kind of, revolving door salon for artists and poets and philosophers and just really interesting, brilliant young people.
KIM: So whether she wanted to fully admit it or not, it seemed like Jane was pretty smitten with this charismatic bad boy, Henry Caulfield. But there was another more reputable man, a war hero who really captured her fancy as well. Can you talk a little bit about how these two crushes worked their way into her writing?
DEVONEY: Yeah. So, and I should back up maybe a little bit and say who Henry Caulfield is since he's not a familiar name. Um, you know, he was a military man who then went on to become first an amateur actor, and then a professional actor of some success. But he's not by any means a name anyone would know today. He was also, however, at the time, one of the country's most renowned ice skaters. He was absolutely charismatic and gorgeous and athletic, um, and it's clear that Jane, in particular, was really, really taken with him for all of these reasons. We know that he wrote together with the sisters. The sisters and some of their male friends put together a periodical called The Quiz. So they were running their own magazine, and Henry participated in the writing of that magazine with them. So again, part of these literary circles. So they were just doing all of these exciting things, some under their own name and some not. Uh, but the other person Jane became smitten with was the war hero, Sir Sidney Smith. And he was probably the country's most famous war hero alongside Lord Nelson. I mean, she just thought he was perfection. The Napoleonic Wars were full on, and England and France were at war. So the idea that Sir Sidney Smith was someone who had been in their circle meant everything, I think to the Porters, that they had come up from nothing and now they were in London alongside the people who were saving the country. So, yeah, these were the two most significant crushes of Jane's life. As you mentioned, neither she nor Maria married, but it's clear that they were very, very much able to experience love and desire and, um, that they had very complicated romantic lives, and I wanted to make those central to the book because I think it just tells us so much. We know what the ideals are about women, what they were supposed to do, but I think we have less evidence about how polite women managed to kind of fly under the radar with a lot of the choices they were making when they ended up with strong feelings for men.
AMY: It's almost like Jane was reaching for the unattainable. Like, she chose two of the most unattainable men, but Maria, on the other hand, um, we compared her to Marianne Dashwood before, and it seemed to me, at least in your telling of it, that she had a very Colonel Brandon-esque man who fell in love with her. But Jane gave this guy the thumbs down and dashed her hopes of romance. She just thought, "Well, without my sister's seal of approval, I'm not gonna go forward with this." So next she turns and makes a very bold move while staying with friends on the Isle of Wight, something her big sister would never have approved of. Can you tell this story, Devoney, about the “sighing soldier?”
DEVONEY: This is, to me, one of the most remarkable parts of the book, and I should say we know all of this because the sisters' letters survive. And I know we're gonna come back to that, but this section, I think more than any other, really reads like a novel because you can't quite believe it, that this is real life that she's describing. So Maria has this opportunity to go with some wealthier friends to the Isle of Wight, uh, kind of, you know, a vacation to try to restore her health. And there are a lot of military men on the island at the time, and she notices this soldier outside the window and she makes eye contact with him. And he keeps returning to the window and kind of sighing. He's not doing anything impolite. He's not accosting her, but it's clear that he finds her attractive. And the two of them end up in an illicit years-long correspondence kept completely secret from their family because they'd never been properly introduced and ultimately ended up engaged to each other without ever having spoken. And I won't tell about what happened when they met. I really hope people will want to read the book to find out.
KIM: Read the book. Yeah.
DEVONEY: We see these things in novels and we think, "That sounds so fake," or "How could that really have happened?"
KIM: Their lives are so exciting, and there's so many amazing stories about their romantic entanglements. These are just some highlights. And you actually write in your book, I'll read: "Their real-life adventures read like funhouse mirror versions of Austen's famous characters and plots," which is so true. So listeners, if you love Jane Austen, you'll get a real kick out of all the drama they managed to get caught up in and somehow get away with.
AMY: Do we know at all, would Austen have known of them or read their work? What do you think?
DEVONEY: So in Austen's, letters, and, you know, only around 160 of her letters survive, but one of them references Anna Maria Porter's novel The Lake of Killarney from 1804 as a book that her nephew, Edward, is "curled up in a great chair reading." So, you know, she definitely knew of the Porter sisters' fiction. Because she was so widely read in fiction, I would be very surprised if Jane Austen hadn't read their books. But there's just that one reference in the letters to her having known of the Porter sisters.
AMY: Okay.
KIM: She must have. I know you can’t say it because you're a biographer, but yeah, I mean, come on. She must have been interested in reading them.
DEVONEY: I agree. Follow the scent. Absolutely. Seems like she must have.
AMY: Okay. So you mentioned how incredibly famous these sisters were in their lifetime. Do you think their fame hurt their chances, ultimately, of making a love match?
DEVONEY: Yes, definitely. And I think it wasn't just the fame, it was fame without fortune. And that's a more complicated answer, but I think you know, the sisters, separately and together, published 26 books. By 1803, they were household names, or at least on their way to becoming so, Jane, in particular. By 1810, certainly both of them were household names. So they were still, you know, in their thirties, and they recognized this: men tended to marry women who were not public women, who were not women with public reputations. Public women who had money, maybe you could overlook the public part for the fortune that they brought. But the Porter sisters, for various reasons, ended up being public women without a fortune. And there, what they found is that men didn't want to take the risk. Men wanted what was the more typically ideal wife, a kind of pliable, passive helpmate. These women had shown that they were neither of those. And so, yes, they knew very well, both sisters talk about this in their letters. "Public fame," Anna Maria puts it very specifically, she says, "makes it hard or almost impossible to have private happiness." And by that she meant love. So they knew. They knew by their thirties what their obstacles were.
KIM: But they had a lot of fun along the way and a lot of romance.
DEVONEY: And I think they were each other's most important relationship. To me, that's the beautiful part of the story, is that these were sisters who were incredibly supportive of each other and who made each other's incredible careers possible. So the love story that I see in this book that's most important is the sisters. Um, the, the ones that are the most colorful or compelling or vivid to readers might be those, you know, sort of never-rans or almost-was-es with these beautiful men. Um, but the most moving relationship to me in this book is between the sisters.
KIM: Yeah, yeah. And speaking of that, was there any competitiveness at all when it came to their writing between the two of them? And then also can you talk a little bit about, um, who came out first as a breakout star?
DEVONEY: Right. I think they watched each other, but they loved each other so much that any competition was more in the realm of joking. In a sense they were competitive in a good way, that is, they wanted to help each other compete successfully in the literary marketplace. Uh, I talked about how Anna Maria came onto the literary scene first in her teens, but 1803 was when Jane Porter published her book, Thaddeus of Warsaw. And people went bonkers for this book. It went through, I think, at least 10 editions by the time Jane Austen died. It was the kind of book people were talking about everywhere. So in that sense, with the first bestseller and P.S. — this one was also critically acclaimed. So I would say it was Jane, the older sister, who became the breakout star after about 10 years of watching her sister be the one who had the greater reputation, the greater name recognition. It was a big shift for them.
AMY: I mean, to me it was so incongruous reading your book; they were so successful, they sold so many copies of their novels, and yet they were practically indigent, you know? How poor were they? Why was it such an unrelenting problem for them for their entire lives?
DEVONEY: Yeah, I think there were periods when they were in genuine poverty and maybe not even eating. But by the time their brother, Robert, starts becoming a successful artist, I think then they move into a period where they're living more in what we probably call genteel poverty. That is, they have apartments, uh, that their mother describes as "a dog hole." I love Mrs. Porter, she's always so blunt. She's like, "This apartment is a dog hole." Um,
KIM: Airbnb review!
DEVONEY: The idea that they became some of the most famous writers of their generation and never broke out of genteel poverty except for very limited moments is kind of what's incredible to me.
AMY: And they were having to throw so much of their royalty money to their brothers.
KIM: Yeah.
DEVONEY: So in any other version of what should have happened at this time for a middle class family, three brothers and two unmarried sisters and a widowed mother, the brothers should have been supporting the three women who were dependent females, but it ended up being the reverse. As the brothers went, in various circumstances, more deeply into debt, the sisters were using their writing and any money they made from it to shore up not only their own household and supporting their widowed mother who only had an army widow's pension, a small amount to live on, but finally their brothers’ debts. And especially Robert, the brother they most loved, they ended up using some of their writings to support their brother, right? It's the exact opposite of what we would think. Robert should have saved the whole family. Uh, and I can't believe that it's this far into our conversation and I haven't mentioned yet, that Robert married a Russian princess. A legit Russian princess, right? So he went off to paint for the czar in Russia. This princess falls in love with him. And eventually they become engaged and they do marry. So this was supposed to be the making of the Porter family. But in fact, the princess turns out to be, uh, what Jane and Maria refer to as “The Horror.” You know, she's not only a horror in terms of her personality, but she cannot manage money, and so she ends up pulling the Porter family into debt. There were periods where Jane and Maria were actually paying off the princess's debts. It's just unthinkable.
AMY: And it was so sad because the whole family was thinking that this princess was gonna be their golden goose. So you could just picture them dancing around the living room. And then they were like, "Oh wait, no. This is not working out how we thought it was gonna be."
DEVONEY: Yeah. They hoped for the best. They hoped that their brother had chosen well. He hadn't.
AMY: So the sisters are having to be the ones to fund everything. And when they were writing these novels, it really depleted them. I mean, emotionally and physically. And their books are so gosh darn long that I kept thinking to myself, "Why didn't you just kind of write a little shorter books?" Also they kind of tag teamed it because it was such a depleting experience to finish a novel. Jane would do one and then she'd be like, "Okay, Maria, it's your turn." Which I thought was kind of interesting.
DEVONEY: Yes. And often they're being paid per volume. So that might be a short answer to what you're asking there.
AMY: Okay. Okay. Because yeah, it was like, "Girl, you're going on and on and on with these books. No wonder you're dead exhausted."
DEVONEY: I mean, three volumes was common for a novel in this period, but it could go up to five. Uh, but you know, as you point out, they would take turns, and I should add, they not only took turns writing books, they often took turns traveling. And this is why so many of their letters exist. They lived in these "dog holes," you know, these not very nice London apartments. And then they moved to a dilapidated Surrey cottage. So as soon as the sisters had any opportunity to stay with a wealthier friend they would go off to a house which had heat and comforts and a bed that they might not even have had to share with someone else. And no drafts and no dampness and, you know, the, the, uh, the servant who might prepare food. And they would write a lot of their novels staying with wealthy friends who understood that the sisters needed the space to support their families. But as a result, they were apart. So when they lived at home, they lived together, but for months on end, they would take turns, one of them going to the house of a wealthy friend living there, writing there, the other staying back with their widowed mother. So they took turns, definitely, and they would write themselves, as you said, to exhaustion, which becomes more and more of an issue as they age.
KIM: So, before we get into the Walter Scott controversy, which we teased a little bit at the top of the show, let's just take a moment to discuss the sisters' best known books. So for this episode, we opted to focus on Jane's epic William Wallace story called The Scottish Chiefs and Maria's equally epic, The Hungarian Brothers.
AMY: I wasn't sure I was gonna like these books, going into them. They are definitely of an era. That said, I thought Scottish Chiefs was pretty exciting. I mean, it had a lot of moments where you're just like, 'Hell yeah." You get wrapped up in it a little bit. Um, it felt very Game Of Thrones meets Braveheart, meets that Robin Hood,, Kevin Costner movie, if you remember that.
KIM: Mm-hmm.
AMY: Anybody that's a fan of that kind of thing, you know, you're gonna be able to immerse yourself in this, except for the fact that it is so damn long. She just keeps going and going and going . Um, but there are so many cinematic moments. Kim, why don't you give us a little rundown of what the book's about.
KIM: I'll give you a quick rundown without spoiling too much. Um, the action takes place in Scotland. It's the early 14th century and the English army is running ransack over Scotland, destroying everything in sight and terrorizing Scottish citizens. William Wallace is at his idyllic Scottish estate with his beloved pregnant wife, Marion, when a series of events, including the appearance of a mysterious box, the contents of which are unknown, leads Wallace to dedicate his life to leading Scotland to freedom. It's very dramatic. Um, and as you follow the Scottish hero's most legendary conquests, you come to fully understand why basically every woman in this novel swoons over this guy like a teenage girl glancing Harry styles, right, Amy?
AMY: Yeah.
KIM: And Porter takes some pretty giant liberties with her telling of William Wallace's story, but all in the name of entertainment, we could say, right, Devoney?
DEVONEY: Oh, absolutely. I love the Harry Styles reference, of course. Uh, but it's like Game of Thrones if there were more good people, right?
KIM: Yes. yeah, yeah.
AMY: And really, just as gruesome.
KIM: Guts, blood, murder.
AMY: I mean, it's such a macho book.
KIM: Totally.
AMY: I'd never have thought a woman was writing this book if you didn't know
KIM: Yeah. We can't give away some of the stuff that happens, but you read certain things and you're like, "Wow, this woman, you know, in the 18th century wrote about this." It's pretty amazing.
DEVONEY: You're absolutely right, these are surprisingly gory. And so books of war that don't put a kind of sheen on it, but are willing to show you the gross stuff, I think it's pretty incredible still.
KIM: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, will you read a passage to showcase to our listeners, sort of the brutality and gore of the story?
DEVONEY: Yeah, so I chose a passage that includes some female characters, although the book is about Wallace, a male character, I wanted listeners to hear what happens when there are women in the story, as there often are. And so this is from chapter 14.
[reads excerpt]
AMY: Here's where I need to bust into the Bryan Adams [sings] "Everything I do, I do it for you!" And you, you can't help but think of Jane's crush on that military hero while you're reading this, right? We know what kind of inspired this. And she paints William Wallace like a saint. I mean, she lays it on so thick. This guy is so heroic. There are very sentimental moments. There are, like, almost religious moments, right?
DEVONEY: For her, telling history was about models and virtue. It was didactic. So her version of historical fiction makes you a better person. And I do think that the parts that you're describing, the perfection, haven't aged well. I think one of the reasons I love Jane Austen's fiction is because she doesn't give us pictures of perfection, but for the Porter sisters, the point of all of this perfection was to ennoble, to make us better people. And even though that section of Helen is, uh, you know, damsel in distress, this isn't so much a damsel in distress book. The women are in the mix with the men in the war. Of course, the men are the ones leading the charge and wearing the armor. Uh, but I do love the idea that this is about trying to make readers understand history, but also, trying to inspire them to better behavior in wartime.
KIM: And people were eating it up.
DEVONEY: They were.
AMY: While I was reading it too, I kept thinking, you know, Scotland's situation with England was like Ukraine and Russia right now. They kept saying "All we want you to do is just leave. You invaded our little country. We were totally happy. We don't want to fight you, but we have to because it's a matter of our survival at this point."
DEVONEY: Yeah. And Jane's first book, Thaddeus of Warsaw, did that with Poland and Russia. So the sisters had so much invested in the idea of tyrants who were doing wrong to independent countries.
KIM: Yes, yes.
DEVONEY: Still topical.
AMY: I definitely had moments where I gasped and moments where I didn't see something coming and moments where my blood was pumping a little.
KIM: Oh yeah, there's some surprises for sure.
AMY: Yeah, I can see why everybody got into it and, and probably appreciated that it was so long and drawn out.
KIM: Well, you could read it to your family and everyone's gonna be interested in wanting to hear, you know, what happens.
DEVONEY: Yes. And it was apparently the favorite book of Queen Victoria and President Andrew Jackson. I mean, there were lots of fans of this novel in the 19th century. Emily Dickinson's copy is really well worn . So, I mean, just to imagine how much this circulated, I add those examples of famous readers.
KIM: Yeah, that's great. Okay, so let's now turn our attention to Maria's best known book, The Hungarian Brothers. So that's about two military siblings fighting against the backdrop of post-Revolutionary France, and Devoney, I'll actually just read from your book to summarize this one. “Maria's story featured two brothers of opposite personalities, count Charles Leopolstat, and his younger brother Demetrius, the orphan sons of a Hungarian nobleman. The brother heroes face adversity and adventure in love and war. Charles, a military genius, guides his brother, whom he shielded from the realities of the family's debts and troubles, in his career and his relationships. The brothers fight for the French in different locations, Charles in Switzerland and Demetrius in Italy. Maria was using her novel to comment on the damage and devastation wrought by war.” So Devoney, this idea of two siblings, can we draw any parallels between the story and Maria and Jane's own relationship?
DEVONEY: Well, I certainly think so, and I hope that's clear In the passage you just read that they, they seem to be, uh, the, the one, rational, uh, serious, responsible sibling and the other one that's, you know, feeling and acting and much more outgoing and in the mix and living vividly. Both Maria and Jane occasionally wondered what would've happened if they were born male. And so I think there are moments in all of their novels where some of their own desires and personalities are being put in each even to these male characters.
KIM: I love them. Can I just say I love them?
DEVONEY: I'm so glad.
AMY: Now, I will say I was not as big of a fan of this book. I didn't even finish it, but the part I did read, the beginning section, the first chapters, I was getting a major Prince William and Prince Harry vibe from the two brothers. That's how she was setting them up. And I also think, again, you know, what is causing these sisters to be so interested in military campaigns and soldiers? Doesn't seem like a topic that a lady would write.
DEVONEY: Yeah, they were living through wars. And I think that's partly, and as I mentioned earlier, their father, all of their brothers were involved in various points in military careers. Everything they read was full of war and death. So I think the art from this period was depicting it. The things they were reading in the newspapers were depicting it. I think Jane really wanted to be a general. I think Jane thought if she were born a man, she would've been a general.
KIM: I love it. Okay, so let's finally dive into this Walter Scott controversy. The sisters were somewhat acquainted with him in their childhood, which is interesting in and of itself. But can you talk about the reaction when he started publishing his novels to great acclaim?
DEVONEY: Yes, and this is complicated, because the sisters were in that charity school in Edinburgh, and at the same time, Scott was in this sort of tony high school getting the very elite education. They were getting this not very good, but really interesting, education. And then they fell out of touch. The Porter family moved to London. Scott went on to become first a famous poet, and then he published, uh, anonymously in 1814, his first novel Waverly. And he didn't acknowledge authorship of this book for a very long time, but it came to be known that he wrote it. Up until Waverly, if anybody had asked readers in Britain who the most famous writers of historical fiction are, they probably would've called it historical romance, the Porter sisters would've been the name you mentioned. But Waverly became this amazing sensation, even more than the Porter sisters had. And then novel after novel started coming out by this Waverly novelist who started to be called The Great Unknown. And the Porters were just really upset that this Great Unknown, and they eventually realized it was Scott, their childhood friend, this Great Unknown was not anywhere in the pages of his books suggesting suggesting that he had been at all inspired in method or in content by these women he knew in his youth, the then most famous writers of historical fiction, Jane and Maria Porter. And I think the less that these novels mentioned them and the more they felt they were being ripped off, they used the word “theft,” they used the word “vampirism,” all they wanted was for somebody to say, "Waverly is great, but it owes some of what it does to the Porters." Increasingly, however, what people started to say was that Waverly was the first work of historical fiction. Waverly is the work of genius. And more and more, the Porters were seen as the feminine ones who weren't doing it right, or you know, who did it in this way that's not really historical, and that Scott was the one who did do it right. So as Scott became the originator, the supposed originator of this genre, the Porters started to become seen as less important. And sadly, they saw this happening during their own lives. Jane met up with Sir Walter in 1815 in London. They reconnected. It would've been an opportunity for him to say, "Hey, your books are great," or anything. Apparently he didn't. She was very angry and she threatened at some point, she said to Maria, "I will give the public the full genealogy of these matters." And it took her 14 years, uh, but she did eventually go public with her claims that she inspired Scott, and I will let people read the book to see what happened when she did that.
KIM: Mm-hmm.
AMY: That, that winds up being pretty interesting. Um, yeah, so check it out.
KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the Porter sisters, as we've discussed, they wrote so many letters to each other over the course of their lives, and it helps you tell their story. But you also mentioned that in their letters to each other, they often wrote in a code or in cryptic ways. Did that impede your research in any way? Did it make it harder for you to find out the facts, or find out what they were really talking about?
DEVONEY: So the hardest thing for me was just the sheer number of unpublished letters. It's 7,000, in the United States alone, of these unpublished letters and manuscripts that, uh, for various reasons made their way to the United States in the 20th century. And I also tell the story in the book of what happened to the letters. Also an interesting, strange story. Uh, but the fact that these letters have never been published and are now, moldering away, unpublished in the archives... i, that's not exactly true, but it is quite a commitment to want to go through this many letters and try to figure out who was who. And some of the people, uh, you know, for instance, Henry Caufield, who we mentioned earlier, it was hard to figure out who he was. The Sighing Soldier, it was hard to figure out who he was. But it's harder because the Porter sisters, they coded the names of some of these men in their letters. And I think it's because they worried that one of their brothers might open the letter or someone else might, um, in the course of delivering it, open it. And so they started to refer to people in their letters as Apollo or Agamemnon. And it took me you know, a few minutes at first to be like, did they really know somebody named Agamemnon? So, you know, I took some reading to figure out who these men they were referring to in code really were. Uh, there are even mentions of them thinking of writing notes to each other on paper in lemon juice or in milk and having one of the other of them hold it up to the fire or the window to read it as if it's invisible ink. And I don't know that they ever did that, but just to, to give you a sense of the ways that they knew they were telling stories that shouldn't be read and that they were worried would be read. Um, so piecing together who was who definitely impeded my research, but it also made it more exciting, you know, wanting to get to the bottom of who these figures were that they were speaking of in such colorful, vivid, loving terms.
AMY: Why was this a story that you wanted to write?
DEVONEY: So I was working on Jane Porter for a book that I was writing on women writers in old age. She lived to the age of 74. And I was working in the archives as I often have done in my books. And I just started reading around a little bit and these letters between these sisters, I learned that Jane had this younger sister, Anna Maria, and I thought, "Well, I'm here, you know, there are these 3000 letters," right? And the more I read, I just felt pulled into the lives that they created and the stories they were telling. And I guess at some point I would just say, if even this sounds, you know, a little bit out there, I kinda felt called to tell the story. For a while, I thought somebody else would tell it. It needed to be told. There hasn't previously been a biography to the sisters for various reasons, which I think is wrong and unfair, and in terms of literary history, just unforgivable. I wanted to write something that I think literary history got wrong. So that's why this was a story, a career, but also a life story that I wanted to tell. A story of the literary marketplace, a story of a marriage marketplace, and a story of resilient sisters who made so much of themselves and added so much to the world, against all odds.
KIM: Thank goodness for the humanities.
AMY: Yeah. Yeah.
DEVONEY: English majors unite!
KIM: Going back to The New Yorker article. Yeah.
AMY: Um, and like we said, your book really does read like a novel. I mean, we only touched on a few of the most fascinating portions of their stories.
DEVONEY: They just wrote everything down.
AMY: And they're funny and they're snarky. So much will make you laugh. They seem like modern day sisters.
KIM: They’re real!
DEVONEY: I'm not sure that the novels will survive. They are not as good as Jane Austen's. Their letters, however… I think their letters are as much of a masterpiece, more of a masterpiece than Jane Austen's novels. And I know that that is a great claim. But these letters are masterpieces for the genre.
KIM: Absolutely. And to just get this three-dimensional view of women living the lives that they lived at that time. It's just an amazing window into their world.
DEVONEY: Oh, I'm so glad you think so.
KIM: Thank goodness that you are bringing them to people's attention.
AMY: And I was so intrigued at how many other women writers of the time period existed. I mean, you've mentioned so many other writers that I felt like I needed to keep a separate little notebook for future episodes for us. I was like, “Who's this? No, who's this?” Including, we had just recently mentioned Sophia Lee's The Recess that I was intrigued by because you mentioned it in your book and I was like, "What? This sounds crazy."
DEVONEY: Yeah. And the Lees were also a set of sisters. I think she probably said it's “So-FY-a” So Sophia and Harriet Lee, also a set of sisters known to the Porters, right? So I don't need to tell you, Kim and Amy, there are so many more lost ladies of lit. And from this period we think it's all Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Jane Austen. There were hundreds, and there's just so much more to learn and know about them.
KIM: Well, thank you so much for writing this book and bringing the Porter sisters back to the reading public's attention. And thank you for joining us today to discuss them. This was so much fun.
DEVONEY: Thank you so much. Love this show and thank you so much to both of you. Such fantastic work you're doing.
KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Visit us at lostladiesoflit.com for more information for show notes.
AMY: And don't forget, we've got a Facebook forum going, if you wanna talk more about the Porter sisters.
KIM: Oh, yeah, yeah, we're going in hot with that. There's lots of cool stuff happening on that forum. And if you love listening to Lost Ladies of Lit, we would love it if you would give us a five-star review wherever you listen. It really helps new listeners find us, and it also just makes us feel really great.
AMY: Bye, everyone. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.