Novelist | 1776-1850

Jane Porter (1776 – 1850) was born in Durham, the daughter of Jane Blenkinsop (1745 – 1835) and army surgeon William Porter (1735 – 1779) who married in 1770. Her ancestors included royalist Endymion Porter (1587 – 1649); Sir William Porter (d.1436), who fought at Agincourt, and the radical John Tweddell (1766 – 1799). Porter had four siblings: John (1772 – 1810), a Colonel; William (1774 – 1850), a naval surgeon;  Robert (1777 – 1842), court painter to Tsar Alexander I, and Anna Maria (1780 – 1832), a writer who collaborated with Porter on short story collections.

After her father’s death, in 1780, the three youngest children and Porter’s mother, ‘born on the border lands’, moved to Edinburgh. The girls attended George Fulton’s school and, significantly, learnt from oral tradition. Anna Maria’s nurse, Bel Johnston, told tales of the Edinburgh widows whose husbands ‘died in defence of Prince Charles’. Luckie Forbes shared folk histories, describing Wallace ‘as if she had seen him’ (Porter 1831). In 1790, the family moved to Northern England, then London and, in 1804, to Surrey. As in Scotland, they engaged in intellectual life with friends including Anna Letitia Barbauld and Hannah More.

Porter was prolific. Her (unpublished) early compositions included a eulogy for Mary Wollstonecraft. The Spirit of Elbe, a romance, appeared in 1799, followed by A defence of the profession of an actor (1800) and a fable: The Two Princes of Persia (1801). She wrote for Fraser’s Magazine and the Amulet; a play, Switzerland (1819), featuring Kean, was withdrawn after one performance.

Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) was Porter’s most celebrated work, fictionalising accounts from Polish refugees of the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794 – 5. Well-received across Europe, its success led to Porter being made a canoness in the Teutonic order of St Joachim. It is the favourite novel of Laura Montreville in Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811).

The significance of Porter’s historical novel, The Scottish Chiefs (1810), set in the Wars of Independence, has been disputed. Admired by Joanna Baillie, Walter Scott described it as a ‘work of genius’ although he disliked Porter’s Wallace (Hogg 1834, p. 237). Napoleon banned the book. Read from a modern perspective, its tragic women are intriguing.

Porter spent her final years preparing new editions of her work, with bespoke prefaces. Her mother died in 1831, her sister in 1832 and her younger brother – who Porter visited in St Petersburg – in 1842. Although she failed to procure a civil list pension, her achievements were recognised by an 1842 grant of £50 from the Literary Fund and, in 1844, by the gift of a rosewood armchair from the admiring booksellers, publishers, authors and mayor of New York. As Dorothy McMillan observed: ‘her success is explicable by the increasing voracity of the public's appetite for narrative, by her promulgation of evangelical Christian ethics as the ‘real’ basis of Western history, and by a contemporary fascination with the woman writer […] which simultaneously allowed contempt and approval’ (McMillan 2004).

Contributed by Valentina Bold

Bibliography

James Hogg, Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (New York: Harper, 1834).

Dorothy McMillan, ‘Jane Porter (bap. 1776, d. 1850), Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, accessed September 2021 https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22571#

Graham Morton, ‘The Social Memory of Jane Porter and her Scottish Chiefs’, The Scottish Historical Review, XVI, 2 (232), October 2012, pp. 311 – 335.

Deborah A. Symonds, ‘PORTER, Jane’, The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 353 – 54.

‘Porter Family Correspondence’, University of Durham Library: Archives and Special Collections, GB 033 POR.

‘Porter MSS’, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. LMC 1855.

Fiona Price, ‘Resisting “the spirit of innovation”: The Other Historical Novel and Jane Porter, Modern Language Review 101 (2006), p.683-51.

Jane Porter, ‘A Retrospective Preface to the Standard Edition of The Scottish Chiefs’ (New York, A.I. Burt: 1831).

Carol Anderson and Aileen M. Riddell, ‘The Other Great Unknowns: Women Fiction Writers of the early nineteenth century’, History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 179 – 95.

 

Books

The Two Princes of Persia, Addressed to Youth (1801)

Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803)

Sketch of the Campaign of Count A. Suwarrow Ryminski (1804)

The Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney (1807)

The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance (1810)

The Pastor's Fire-Side: A Novel (1817)

Switzerland (1819)

Owen, Prince of Powys (1822)

Duke Christian of Lüneburg (1824)

With Anna Maria Porter, Tales Round a Winter Hearth (1826); Coming Out (1828); The Field of Forty Footsteps (1828).

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