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...