Jane Porter was sitting poolside at the luxe Halekulani Hotel in Hawaii when the idea for a novel came in a rush, like the trailer for a movie. One element was being at a crossroads in her life ...

In her 1929 essay “Women and Fiction,” Virginia Woolf declared that in the 19th century “a woman lived almost solely in her home and her emotions.” Male novelists could derive inspiration ...

Jane and Anna Maria Porter ruled Britain’s literary scene—until male imitators wrote them out of the story Devoney Looser - Author, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters ...

Although Jane and Maria Porter’s morally uplifting melodramas have little in common with Jane Austen’s wry comedies of manners or the Brontë sisters’ passionate chronicles, literary scholar ...