Devoney Looser’s Sister Novelists is not a book you can read quickly—and you don’t want to. It is a rich and rewarding study of the lives, times, and writings of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two sisters contemporaneous with Jane Austen and, in their time, far more famous. They sold millions of books, hung out with the rich and famous, and yet tottered on destitution their entire lives. After inventing the historical novel, they lost credit and sales to Sir Walter Scott and eventually were forgotten.

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës will make you laugh, cry, pull your hair in frustration, and marvel. Looser doesn’t tell just the story of the intelligent, well-read, personable, attractive, and highly productive authors. She does not settle for a “surface-level tale.” She tells the interlacing stories of family, friends, acquaintances, theater stars, the peerage. The future Queen Victoria even scampers by as an eight-year-old.

Looser documents the new kind of fiction created by Jane and Maria (as she was known), combining grand historical events and personages with “domestic” concerns. Consciously or necessarily, Looser models that form in her biography, spanning the known and unknown people and moments of the day, the way the sisters were involved, and the way they carried out their often difficult domestic affairs.

And they were involved: with war heroes, famous painters (including their brother Robert), actors and actresses, the Prince Regent (later George IV), the wealthy who were nasty and the wealthy who were kind, Russian nobility, and a parade of handsome, charming, and utterly unsuitable men. The sense and sensibility ranges from Jane meeting the Tsar of Russia to Maria being groped by a society matron mesmerized by her bosom.

Much of the sisters’ story comes from “three or four closely-packed sea-chests” full of family correspondence, primarily that of Jane and Maria. The book vibrates with such a pirate’s energy that it is tempting to claim that Looser plundered the Porter collections. But plunder does not capture the time and care—the years she took in half a dozen libraries going through hundreds of letters—or the determination with which she followed up each lead. Nor putting this wealth of information together in a book that exudes confidence and enthusiasm rather than fatigue.

Is it a coincidence that the Porter sisters suffered carpal tunnel syndrome from their frenetic quill-penning and that Looser suffered the same condition after completing nearly two decades of work about them?

One example must stand for Looser’s dogged tracing of meaningful linkages. Another biographer would have been content to say, “Jane met N. P. Willis, the most famous American writer of the day,” then described their visits and writing sessions before his marriage and return to America. Looser goes further to connect Willis to Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave and author of one of the most horrifying American slavery narratives. Jacobs had slipped captivity in North Carolina and became a longtime nanny for the Willis children.

Looser’s recounting of this history not only provides important historical information but also reveals aspects of Willis’s nature that calls into question as least some of Jane’s enthusiasm for him. Willis’s first wife, Mary, went out of her way to protect Jacobs from slave hunters in New York. After Mary died, his second wife, Cornelia, also protected Jacobs and finally bought her freedom. Willis himself, however, was pro-slavery and generally thought a scoundrel. Yet he also helped Jane win a major publishing contract at a time when she was desperately short of money. Jacobs’ autobiography, by the way, ultimately eclipsed anything Willis wrote.

Looser, in fact, is the rare biographer of the period who digs into slavery to be sure to call it out when it matters. The Porter family was abolitionist, and a few of Maria’s writings attacked slavery. Looser points out that Robert, the painter, had a Black and likely underpaid assistant early, yet also—having later turned diplomat—handled the treaty that ended the slave trade in Venezuela.

Most of the book, of course, delves into the writing projects, chaste passions, and varied lives of Jane and Maria. They cranked out books to pay the bills, then expended more energy on clever and self-sacrificing ways to juggle those bills. Good writing lives in the details, and every page has at least one arresting anecdote or story, one “Aha!” moment after another. Here’s one: the Porter sisters sold millions of books in the U.S. The lack of copyright protection across nations means they were never paid for these editions. When American publishers finally decided they owed the Porters something, they didn’t send cash but rather a rosewood rocking chair. Perhaps so that Jane could sit and contemplate their theft and her poverty (this was years after Maria had died).

Looser points out interesting connections with Austen. One is that Jane Porter accepted a request by royal handlers to write a romantic history of the Hanover family. A few years earlier, Austen had rejected such a project. After three hard years of work by Jane Porter, the fickle royal family failed to support the book at publication and it failed. Would the same fate have awaited Austen? Looser makes small connections too, as when she notes that the two Janes shared Benjamin Crosby as a publisher for a while (the firm never published Austen).

Two other curious and apparently unrelated reverberations with Austen come close upon each other, real Jane Porter incidents against Austen fiction. Porter receives a proposal from one Charles Rivers, whom she politely but firmly declines. Channeling Austen’s fictional Mr. Collins, he believes that her “kind letter of rejection was actually an encouragement.” Sir Walter of Austen’s Persuasion cares only about physical looks; readers cringe when he speaks about the ugliness of people in Bath. Yet Porter says after a day at the Pump Room, “Never in my life did I behold such a collection of frights, men and women, all uglier, one than another.”

Maria took up writing early, publishing as a teenager. She was always prolific, having the ability to churn out a new book whenever the sisters and their mother ran low on funds. (She often pushed to the detriment of her health.) Poverty was their plight from the time the girls’ father died when they were young. A widow and unmarried sisters needed the support of their brothers, but all three of theirs ran up debts that prevented them from helping. The talented artist and social climber Robert often left debts for his impoverished sisters to pay. Only William ever helped, and that was late in life and grudging.

Neither sister ever married, the other route to financial stability. They had many flirtations and some evident real relationships, but none of the handsome, smart, charming young men ever stepped up. (Rivers apparently lacked smarts and charm.) Maria wrote, “If some honest man will marry me, then I will give up the muse;—but if not, authorship and old maidism shall go together.”

Looser provides short critiques of Maria and Jane’s works, which ranged from novels to operas and plays to travelogue nonfiction, which Jane edited for brothers Robert and William. Though male heroes dominate, their fiction portrays strong women “drawn with vivid discernment and human sympathy” and features spirited dialogue. Otherwise, their novels suffer from the limitations of similar romances, which include implausibly perfect heroes and stories that go forward by coincidence rather than by character motivation. But, if the fiction of the Porter sisters was “outlandish and improbable,” Looser observes, their lives were equally so.

Maria published eighteen novels. Jane published eight novels and edited five books for the two brothers. The sisters coauthored four books. Maria’s most relevant works today are likely The Hungarian Brothers and The Lake of Killarney. Jane’s are Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs.

Next time: other worthy reads from 2022.

“The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen,” a trilogy that traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions, is available from Jane Austen Books (https://www.janeaustenbooks.net/search?type=product,article,page&q=*Marriage%20of%20Miss%20Jane*) and Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+marriage+of+miss+jane+austen&crid=2XYG3FKV0UUNL&sprefix=the+marriage+of+miss+jane%2Caps%2C235&ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_25).

A “boxed set” that combines all three in an e-book format is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Miss-Jane-Austen-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B079QFSB4T/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=the+marriage+of+miss+jane+austen+e-book&qid=1607300317&sr=8-5.