Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Looser, Devoney

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781635575293)

Vendor: Devoney Looser
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$30.00
$30.00
$30.00
Subtotal: $30.00
Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Looser, Devoney

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës

$30.00
Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Looser, Devoney

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës

$30.00
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
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For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, a fascinating, insightful biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës.

Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters-exact contemporaries of Jane Austen-were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family's considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for any biographers to come.

But history hasn't been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters' works as his inspiration. With Scott's more prolific publication and even greater fame, the Porter sisters gradually fell from the pinnacle of celebrity to eventual obscurity. Now, Professor Devoney Looser, a Guggenheim fellow in English Literature, sets out to re-introduce the world to the authors who cleared the way for Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters. Capturing the Porter sisters' incredible rise, from when Anna Maria published her first book at age 14 in 1793, through to Jane's fall from the pinnacle of fame in the Victorian era, and then to the auctioning off for a pittance of the family's massive archive, Sister Novelists is a groundbreaking and enthralling biography of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction.

Author: Devoney Looser
ISBN-10: 163557529X
ISBN-13: 9781635575293
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: English
Published: 10/25/2022
Pages: 576
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.15lbs
Size: 9.48h x 6.39w x 2.06d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2022
Publishers Weekly 08/22/2022
Booklist 10/01/2022 pg. 12
Choice 07/01/2023
By Devoney Looser
By Devoney Looser
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Devoney Looser is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author or editor of nine books on literature by women, including The Making of Jane Austen. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, and she's had the pleasure of talking about Austen on CNN. Looser, who has played roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen, is a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

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