It is the nature of life in a college town like Columbia that people come and go. And while we’re sad to say goodbye to folks, it does at least mean that we have the pleasure of welcoming them back again. So it is that we’re thrilled to welcome Devoney Looser back to Columbia to talk about her brand-new book, Sister Novelists. For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, this is a fascinating, insightful biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës. In a starred review, Kirkus describes the book like this: “a triumph of literary detective work and storytelling, this is a must-read for the Austen and Brontë crowd,”
Devoney will be appearing at Skylark in conversation with another well-known Austen aficionado, Janet Saidi of KBIA. It’s going to be a dazzling evening!
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.
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.
Janet Saidi is a public radio producer and assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. In addition to the Austen Connection podcast, she’s written and produced stories for NPR, PBS, the BBC, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Her work at NPR-affiliate KBIA focuses on building community and creating oral histories through audio with projects like You Don't Say, Missouri on Mic, and the most recent podcast Cover Story with Stephanie Shonekan. Janet lived for many years in England, where she received a master's in literature from University College, London.
