Why did Tyler love this book?
Jane and Maria Porter were the true founders of the historical novel, but they remain in the shadow of Sir Walter Scott.
This book is the first full-length biography of the sisters and how their novels, including The Scottish Chiefs (Jane) and The Hungarian Brothers (Maria) were forerunners of the genre. In my opinion, The Scottish Chiefs equals or excels anything Sir Walter Scott wrote. Looser does a wonderful job of making the sisters feel like real people through her extensive research and quoting from their letters.
We feel sympathy for the sisters who felt compelled to write to support their family, and we find out the details of their relationship with Sir Walter Scott, allowing us to draw our own conclusions on whether or not they influenced him.
1 author picked Sister Novelists as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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…