Sister Novelists in the Age of Austen: Jane and Anna Maria Porter

Abstract

Jane and Anna Maria Porter were celebrated novelists who, for many decades, were more famous than their contemporary Jane Austen. Why did the Porter sisters' celebrity status dwindle, as Austen's literary star rose? Devoney Looser, who is writing a biography of the Porter sisters, will share her findings about their fascinating and previously undocumented nineteenth-century lives, showing how (as Anna Maria Porter once put it) a female author's public fame could be the death knell of her private happiness.