Jane Porter Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jane Porter

The following essay discusses Jane Porter and her sister, Anna Maria Porter.

Jane Porter and her younger sister, Anna Maria, were well-known popular novelists of the early nineteenth century. The public's response to Jane Porter's moral and patriotic romance Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) was so enthusiastic that Robert Tate Irvine, likening her to the author of Gone with the Wind (1936), calls her "the Margaret Mitchell of 1803." Though both sisters enjoyed such popularity, neither has received much critical attention. In both their novels and their shorter tales the Porters drew their stories from contemporary life, from military history, and from legend, yet wrote in an idiom foreign to twentieth-century taste--a language of sentiment, moral certainty, and idealized heroism. Nineteenth-century readers enjoyed the Porters' use of conventional moral example, pure and breathless love, and high adventure. That the Porter sisters took seriously their vocation as writers is suggested by Jane's description of their similar objectives: "[W]hen we began to write for publication, we regarded our works not as a pastime for ourselves, or a mere amusement for others, but as the use to be made of an entrusted talent 'given to us for a purpose': and for every word we set down in our pages, we believed we must be accountable to Heaven and to our country."

Jane and Anna Maria Porter were born into a relatively poor but respectable family in which education, moral seriousness, and religious faith were central.

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