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Research and writing of a book on British sister novelists Jane Porter (1775-1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832), contemporaries of Jane Austen.

Decades before the Brontës, Jane Porter (1775-1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832) burst onto the literary scene. The Porters unabashedly published as sisters, signing their names to dozens of novels, poems, and plays. They were pioneering, single career women at a moment of cultural change, negotiating the literary marketplace with the marriage marketplace. They were widely fêted and admired. But as they reveal in moving, unpublished letters, they paid a steep price. For a woman, Anna Maria concluded, public fame was the death knell of private happiness. To add insult to injury, their fall from popularity was so precipitous that few today have heard of them. My book, Sister Novelists, is poised to be the first biography of the Porter sisters, sharing for the first time stories of their accomplished, lovelorn, and complicated lives. It promises to shift understandings of struggles faced by the first generations of professional women writers in the age of Jane Austen.

Though virtually forgotten today, British sister novelists Jane Porter (bap. 1776-1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1780-1832) were international celebrities. Their bestselling historical fiction was in print for decades, but their innovations in the genre prior to Sir Walter Scott's have only begun to be acknowledged. In what is poised to be the first study of the Misses Porter, my book project sets out to document their important literary contributions, as well as the ways they tried to negotiate the changing market for authors after Scott's success. I will also show how their great literary---but modest---financial achievements presented obstacles on the marriage market. Because thousands of their unpublished letters survive, the Porter sisters provide us with an almost unprecedentedly wide window onto the world of female authorship; rising and waning celebrity; financial struggles and hidden debt; and (for better or worse) failed courtship in the late 18th and early 19th century.