Devoney Looser’s acclaimed Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës came out in October 2022 from Bloomsbury Publishing. Recently, I caught up with her to discuss what’s changed following her subjects’ reintroduction into the literary world.
Bethany Creed: You wrote a wonderful article for Literary Hub on your experience spending twenty years working on Sister Novelists. How has it felt to put the book down for good, and to see it take on its own life in the world? Has the distance given you any new feelings or insights?
Devoney Looser: There are things that you would do differently twenty years on. For instance, Hilary Mantel died right before the book came out, and the ways that Mantel has been talked about since her death have really been illuminating to me—and she’s actually someone I had a chance to meet once at the Huntington Library. In hindsight, I wish I’d said more in the book about Mantel and how her career was made possible by the Porters to some degree. The example of Mantel also gives me fresh hope about women writing the historical novel and what that could mean in the twenty-first century that I didn’t necessarily feel even a year before the book came out. So it’s interesting how these things that happen along the way change your sense of your own book’s meaning.
BC: My mind’s kind of blown by that because I hadn’t necessarily connected Mantel’s success with the Porter sisters’ struggle to make space for historical fiction and for women authors. But even now, Mantel’s career feels like a triumph for women. And it feels like even when she started, historical fiction writing was not as respected—that she made it “literary.”
DL: Mantel put historical fiction back on the map. She was a genius. The Porter sisters had genius as well. Interestingly, both Mantel’s papers and the Porter papers are at the Huntington Library. And if you look at Mantel’s early career, she went through a lot of real struggles, too, and one of her first historical novels was set during the French Revolution. So, for me, there are lots of things that make the story of Mantel’s career resonate in new ways with that of the Porter sisters.
BC: Do you happen to know if Mantel had read anything of the Porter sisters, or was aware of them?
DL: When I met Mantel, I was deeply involved in The Making of Jane Austen. It was about to come out. So we talked about Jane Austen. I’m not sorry that’s what we discussed because I learned from that conversation that Mantel was really interested in Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, even before that excerpt of hers came out posthumously and revealed she was writing a book that was a kind of homage to Austen, or a continuation of Austen’s characters centering on Mary Bennet. It was really interesting and lovely to talk a little about that with Mantel, but I do regret not having asked her about the Porter sisters.
BC: Oh, wow. Did she say anything to you about Mary Bennet?
DL: She wanted my take on whether I thought Mary Bennet got a bad rap, and I think it’s clear from her posthumous excerpt that Mantel identified a little bit with Mary Bennet.
BC: As do we all.
DL: Right? The brainy, less attractive sister was someone Mantel felt hadn’t been given her due in Pride and Prejudice. So that was what our conversation centered on—how much should we imagine Mary Bennet as having gotten a raw deal. As a type.
BC: Never really the heroine.
DL: Exactly. We’ve already gotten far afield, but I think this is something that the Porter sisters also do. Reading about them and reading their writings today, it’s easy for people to say, “Well, they haven’t been part of the conversation.” And that raises the question of how we relate the Porter sisters to those authors we know so much better—those who have gotten their due or come down to us more fully.
BC: Speaking of what hasn’t come down to us, in the LitHub article you mention how the evolution of archives over the past twenty years—in particular, widespread digitization—helped your project along by giving you more resources than you had when you first started writing Sister Novelists. By 2019 you were able to tie up loose ends by finding “shadowy minor figures” that had long stumped you because of their erasure from the historical record. Who are some of these figures? What was your most interesting discovery facilitated by archival evolutions?
DL: I think the one that most stymied me relates to a section of the book where Anna Maria Porter falls for a sighing soldier outside of her window and they go on to have this long secret correspondence. I knew that his last name was Cowell and his first name was Frederick. But these are both relatively common names. I looked in all of the places I could think of, including army lists, and it was really frustrating to not find him. But then a lot of the digitized resources, like Ancestry.com, started coming into focus. From another letter I knew that one of his family names was Gardiner with an “I”, and, suddenly, once I had all his names, I found all these records. I found that he married—you know, after he and Anna Maria were no longer together (plot spoiler!). Digital resources made it possible to triangulate information to find him.
BC: When you said “minor figures,” I was picturing people who figured as minor in the biography…but that’s an entire chapter that you wouldn’t have been able to write very well if you couldn’t find the context of that character.
DL: Right? So many of the sisters’ letters describe their emotional investments in people, but don’t necessarily tell us who they were. They knew a lot of very famous people, but they also spent a lot of time with neighbors and people who were not at the center of the culture, who weren’t celebrities or wealthy people with titles, and so learning more about them wasn’t really possible until I had a wider range of access to materials from this period. That access allowed me to discuss not only what the sisters thought but also who they were talking to.
BC: Where did you learn how to explore all these avenues? Did you kind of teach yourself how to do the research?
DL: I had a formative experience right after I finished my PhD. I was accepted in 1994 to Paula Backscheider’s NEH summer seminar, “Biography and Biographical Evidence,” which was held at the Public Record Office in London, now the National Archives. It’s strange to say I had a PhD in British literature before I had ever gone to Britain, but I am a first-generation college student and had never traveled to the UK before. Paula took us to archives and taught us how to look for things. I think the most valuable thing that she taught me was not to trust secondary sources, to go back to the primary source whenever you could. I think we so often read something that an esteemed person says and think, “Well, they already did that, they already know what that document says.” But if you go back, you might notice something completely different, and it’s possible that someone made an error. Sister Novelists is long, but it’s not comprehensive, and I’m sure there are errors and things that need to be revisited in years to come. I hope that people will return to these primary sources that I used to find new things and tell us new things.
BC: What was it like having to organize and keep notes on something so vast over such a long period of time? What was your process like there?
DL: I’m not sure that this is a “do as I do” story! I was using one organizational tool, and the company went bankrupt, for instance. So the way I had been storing information had to be completely extracted. I think the most difficult part was that the material I had was so vast and some of it was in print, some of it was in microfilm. I started this project when microfilm machines were around by the dozens in libraries. Now you’re lucky if you can find one, right? I still have lots of paper files and have not even digitized it all, myself, so I can’t say that I’m an exemplar of how-to-stay-organized. But by the end I was using Scrivener, and that was extraordinarily helpful as a way to organize drafts and keep track of materials as they evolved.
BC: You said you set aside the project for two years in order to write a book on Jane Austen’s afterlives. Returning to it refreshed, you rethought the audience you wanted Sister Novelists to reach. I would love to hear more about this.
DL: I initially thought, “I will write a literary biography.” I love reading biography, and I had read lots that I admired. But I started rethinking things after The Making of Jane Austen came out, which was the first book that I tried to write as a crossover book. A crossover is where you combine scholarly methods with accessible prose so that you might be read by people outside of the academy, and I thought: “If I go even further in that direction with the Porter sisters, could I reach even more people with their story?” Their story is so dramatic—their lives were like romance novels in so many ways, and so the material lent itself to being told more commercially. I wanted to see if I could do it.
BC: Wow.
DL: Yeah. And by commercially, I mean, instead of reaching a hundred or a couple hundred readers, hoping for readers in the thousands, right? That’s just a different magnitude of exposure and a different sense of who your audience is, and I don’t think every project has to be that. But this one just seemed so appropriate as a work of feminist recovery that could be told in a responsible and scholarly way, yet written in a more narrative nonfiction way. I thought this approach might get more people thinking about how the era we call Jane Austen’s includes many figures who are not well-known beyond scholarly circles.
BC: What was it like for you, as a Jane Austen scholar, going from writing about a figure that everyone already knows to trying to sell people on someone no one’s ever heard of?
DL: There are some tough things about that shift! I was sort of spoiled by working on Jane Austen and having people outside of the academy say, “Oh, Jane Austen, I love Jane Austen,” or, “I hate Jane Austen, but my sister loves her.” With the Porters it was often a lot harder to get people excited because they would say, “Well, I’ve never heard of them,” and their eyes would glaze over, or they would feel ashamed. And I’d think, “No, you don’t have to feel ashamed—literally, like five people care about them.” I think my enthusiasm for the subject and showing how the Porters are part of the story of women being written out of history was part of the hook. Another part of the hook was that they were childhood friends of Sir Walter Scott, and that he was stealing their thunder. I think those were things that hooked people to want to know more…when it worked.
BC: It completely worked! The Los Angeles Review of Books observes that your narrative approach to biography is a hybrid of accessible prose and meticulous research, and that it provides an intriguing model for popular literary scholarship. Personally, I found Sister Novelists to be a page-turner in a way that few biographies achieve, even ones that I’ve loved. What brought you to your unique style?
DL: That review is by Thomas McLean, one of the world’s foremost Porter scholars, so it means a lot to me that he wrote such a generous review. The biographies that I’ve loved—by Claire Tomalin, by Janet Todd—make links between the past and the present, work archivally in a very responsible way, and also proceed in a storytelling mode. Those were things I was definitely going for. I started doing more writing after The Making of Jane Austen that was consciously public-facing. I had spent years speaking to the Jane Austen Society of North America, a group of about five thousand mostly non-academics who share an appreciation for Austen. “Author appreciation” is often used as a slam in the academy, but I got very accustomed to talking to the audience I wanted to write for, if that makes sense. I learned what worked and what things were curiosities to them, and that’s partly where I cut my teeth on how to pitch Sister Novelists. I like that people see it as a page-turner and a hybrid. I imagined a lot of what I was doing as creating scenes. I have done a lot of work with film adaptations of Austen, and I imagined some of the stories I was telling as filmic.
BC: You put your finger on why I see the style as so unique: it’s scenic in a way you don’t always get in nonfiction. But I guess the material also facilitated that for you, because the Porters wrote their lives as scenes.
DL: Absolutely. In their letters they wrote down so much dialogue that they overheard in their daily lives, and so I had dialogue that I could use on the page. That is rare. Most people’s letters to their sisters don’t try to record word for word a conversation they had with a lover or a friend, but Jane and Anna Maria Porter did that with each other.
BC: With such a specific vision in mind, what was it like trying to find a publisher? How did your collaboration with market-minded editors change the shape of the project, if at all?
DL: There were two very big breaks for the project. I applied for and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar Fellowship in 2018, and both of those ratified the work’s importance. That allowed me to find my agent, Stacey Glick, who worked with me for a year on the proposal for the book. A lot of people may not know that nonfiction books sell on proposal. She worked with me on my proposal and just really made it sing. She helped bring the book to auction. I ended up with an editor at Bloomsbury, who was my former undergraduate student, Grace McNamee. Taking the project from the proposal to the agent to the publisher—and to a commercial press—was a different kind of odyssey from publishing an academic book; I didn’t have a lot of experience to go on. I learned by doing. I’m happy to be a resource and to share my experiences with people who are navigating this process themselves. Somebody who was very helpful to me was Tilar Mazzeo, who has written several best-selling biographies, several of them about women, and who is bringing a book out in 2024 from Yale University Press about how academics can pivot to writing narrative nonfiction. I know because I just had a chance to endorse it.
BC: That’s really great. I expect for a lot of us it will be some unlearning.
DL: I still want to be able to write in scholar-facing modes as well as public-facing modes. But I think our entire profession of literary studies is in a kind of wake-up mode in terms of the ways we need to make ourselves heard outside our fields. There’s very little that’s fortunate about that need to turn outward—but it’s a practice, and it’s a lot harder than it looks. I don’t know if people want to hear that or not. I think there’s this sense that writing for a public-facing audience is easier than writing inscrutable jargon-laden prose—to use the negative way people often characterize academic writing. Writing prose for experts is seen as harder than writing prose for non-experts, and I just don’t think that’s true. They’re both hard in different ways, and they’re both a practice.
BC: The archival material on the Porters is vast, and you have mentioned the pain of having to cut a lot from the final version of Sister Novelists. As someone who could easily have read a few hundred more pages, I also find that painful! What did you cut, and what do you most wish you could have included?
DL: I cut about 40 percent of what’s there. I cut a great deal of material from Jane Porter’s late life, after her sister died in 1832. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with a lot of the outtakes, as I’m thinking about them scenically. One of my favorite scenes is the first time Jane Porter went on a train—I can’t help but think, had Jane Austen lived, what would she have said about being on a train for the first time? You don’t even think of Austen alongside trains—but had she lived a life of conventional length, she would have been on a train. Jane Porter wrote down the fears she had about getting on the train. She wrote beautifully about what it was like, this “steaming hippopotamus,” I think, was her phrase, a great kind of animalized description of what she experienced and felt. I think there are some people who think my book might have benefited from being cut even more. But thank you for saying otherwise.
BC: Just out of curiosity, where did Jane Porter come down on trains?
DL: Well, she ended up taking them, but she had a real sense of being in danger at first—and, of course, there were lots of people who were killed. I think carriages were clearly far more dangerous than trains, but a train accident captured people’s imaginations differently. When Jane was led by a porter out onto a platform, she was absolutely fearful for her life. She felt like she needed somebody to hang on to her to make sure that she wasn’t whisked off.
BC: Ha! I wanted to tell you that the only times I was able to put down Sister Novelists was when I felt too emotionally involved in the tragedies and disappointments of the Porter sisters, whose lives were sad in a lot of ways. You really make them come alive, and for any avid reader I think they must feel like kindred spirits. If reading the book can be difficult in that way, I imagine writing it must have been much harder. How was the emotional journey for you?
DL: I have to admit that there are some parts that I reread, and I cry. That probably suggests an overinvestment in the material. But there are places where their hearts are on the page, and the things that happen to them are just so surprising or moving or unfair. There were definitely moments where I felt like we were kindred spirits, but, as I also say in the prologue, there were plenty of moments where I wanted to shake them by the shoulders and say, “What are you doing? Don’t make the same mistake I’ve seen you make ten years ago in this other set of letters, but that you don’t seem conscious of!” That, too, felt emotional for me. I think part of what creates the sense of kinship is the vast amount of material. Somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand manuscripts associated with the family—letters or fragments of their writing—survive. After reading through most of them once, some of them twice, I know more about this family than I do about my own. There was a moment when I realized that I knew Jane and Maria Porter’s widowed mother’s undertaker’s name—and I was like, “Yeah. This is a problem, that I know the name of the undertaker of the widowed mother.” There are definitely things about immersing yourself in that amount of material that feel slightly insane.
BC: I’m glad you did it anyway. What is one thing you wish you knew about the Porters that’s missing from the record?
DL: Sometimes people say to me, “Do you feel like you’ve done something unethical in using these letters and telling these secrets of their lives in this way?” I do wish that Jane Porter had conveyed more directly what she wanted to happen to the papers. What we do have from her late life is her saying she doesn’t want them ever to be published. But she can’t bring herself to destroy her sister’s letters. To me this seems like a tension within her. She wanted her and her sister’s genius to be recognized and to live on. But at the same time, she had a sense of propriety and didn’t want people to know that her sister was engaged to the soldier—or the secrets about her and her dear friend Henry Caulfield. So I wish there was something telling us more about what Jane thought about saving these trunks and trunks of documents. It would also be interesting to know what some of the people that the Porters met thought about them. I would love to know more about that than we have.
BC: Have you read everything the Porter sisters published in their lifetimes? Which is your favorite, and why?
DL: So together and separately, the Porters published twenty-six books. Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810) were the two bestsellers that lived on the longest. But some of the works that are closest to my heart are the ones that they publish together. You get a flavor of each sister’s gifts with one joint publication, Coming Out; and The Field of Forty Footsteps. Coming Out is Anna Maria’s novel of manners, and The Field of Forty Footsteps is Jane’s historical fiction about two brothers and a duel, which has some supernatural elements. There are things from each of them that are really beautifully done in this more mature work of theirs. So that’s a favorite work of mine.
BC: Are those available?
DL: There isn’t a modern edition. You can find them on Google Books. Ideally, there would be modern editions where the reader could not only have a reliable text but also not have to read in facsimile and have an introduction as well as annotations that reflect on what their sources were—where we have a sense of what happened historically versus where what they’ve written is definitely fiction.
BC: Yes, crossing my fingers for that someday.
DL: There is also an homage to Jane Austen that Anna Maria Porter published called Honor O’Hara. The sisters were both big admirers of Austen, although they didn’t know who was writing her novels until 1818, when the biographical notice first came out. But Honor O’Hara clearly shows Anna Maria Porter’s attempt to go in the domestic novel direction. I enjoy it, too.
BC: Previously you’ve contextualized the erasure of the Porter sisters from literary history in the wider context of what Clifford Siskin called “the Great Forgetting,” the myth that female novelists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were rare or are not worth reading. You have said that we still haven’t done enough remembering, and we still don’t know enough about how we forgot. Do you have advice for anyone who wants to participate in this recovery work? Where do we start, or how do we go on?
DL: I’m glad you brought up that line from Clifford Siskin. I don’t think I mention anywhere in the book that he was my dissertation director. It was really exciting to be studying with him when he was putting together this sense of “the Great Forgetting,” which is such an apt and resonant phrase, and also instructive in suggesting that we need to find ways to speak beyond our scholarly community that telegraph to people what’s at stake. There’s a lot going on now with hybrid forms and creative nonfiction that melds fiction and biography into new kinds of genres. Personally, I want to see the nonfiction side continue. I know that the creative stuff is more fun and really reaches people, but I also would like for us to continue to work with the archival material we have—even when it is insufficient—to document the stories we can tell as well as the ones that we can make up, if that makes sense. I would hate for us to lose the historian part of the literary historian as we move into new modes of recovery.
BC: What do you have in mind when you say the creative things that are coming out?
DL: Well, I think there are lots of places where the archives are silent, and especially regarding marginalized people. And so I see with excitement lots of work coming out about historical figures—and where there isn’t archival information, using creative ideas to combine fiction with the facts we know. And I see that as really, in a way, akin to what the Porter sisters were doing. The Porters saw historical fiction as a kind of a gateway drug in the fiction market—they thought fiction could take people to history, for the good of the nation. They thought the past could inspire the present. They wrote about despots; they wrote about independence struggles; they wrote about people who were wrongly denied their liberty—and doing that during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars was not a coincidence. It was intentional. Today, too, we need to tell stories that can’t be told just through the archives about the historical figures and the pasts that we’ve lost. But I also don’t want us to neglect the histories that we can try to retell.
BC: You’ve remarked that historical fiction doesn’t age as well as other genres, and that aspects of the Porter sisters’ style no longer appeal to modern tastes. I wanted to revisit your thoughts on this topic, particularly in light of the new conversations the book’s release may have facilitated for you. Do you see the Porters’ erasure as more to do with sexist trends in literary history, or their lack of alignment with later tastes? And could you envision a resurgence of contemporary interest in the works themselves? More than just their biographies?
DL: I wrote a short piece for the Washington Post that tried to address how we miss writers like the Porters when we’re looking for the likes of Jane Austen. I really hope that there’s a resurgence of interest in the Porters and the works themselves. But I have to be honest and say that we would have to be more comfortable with men crying a lot. The Porters’ fiction involves a lot of men fighting on these gruesome battlefields, and the books in no way romanticize what battle looks like. There were people at the time who said their books must have been written by men who were on the battlefield because they’re so gruesome. In the Porters’ novels, the men come off the battlefield and cry. I think, in fact, it’s their male characters, more than their female characters, who haven’t traveled through time quite so well. However, I have had people tell me they’ve read all of the Porters’ works, and I’ve had people tell me that they grew up in American households where the family was of Scottish descent and they had The Scottish Chiefs in their house along with the Bible. That gives me a sense that, you know, there might be a resurgence of interest in the Porters. People who like Outlander might return to some of these novels and say, “This is my jam.”
BC: What you’re pointing out about how ideals of masculinity have changed is so interesting. How would you say the Porters’ heroines measure up today? Because a lot of times, people look back at heroines of the past and think that they’re boring, or bland, or angels-in-the-house. How are the Porters’ heroines?
DL: Jane Austen has that line, “Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked.” She could have used that line to describe some of the Porters’ heroines, especially Jane Porter’s, but the Porters also feature female characters—sometimes heroines, sometimes villains—who cross-dress or participate in battle. They get out there. They are not just milquetoast damsels in distress. That said, their heroines seem very rarely to make any mistakes. And, as you know from having read about the Porters, their own lives were certainly not lived as pictures of perfection, as much as they saw themselves as polite and moral. They realized that the world was set up in these unfair ways that they tried to navigate, and not often with the success that they were looking for.
BC: Circling back to the question of their literary legacies; we cannot talk about the Porter sisters’ historical obscurity without talking about Sir Walter Scott’s brighter literary afterlife because of how many similarities their fictions uncoincidentally shared. What do you see Scott as having stolen from the Porters? And, if anything, what did he do differently? (Beyond the simple answer of: was a man, and maybe that’s the whole answer!) In other words, can you speculate as to what in Scott’s writings his contemporaries perceived as superior? And do you see any reason that Scott suits our tastes today better than the Porter sisters?
DL: Well, Scott’s not exactly had an easy time of it in his afterlife either, has he? I think there are few young people I’ve talked to today who’ve read much of his writings. That said, some of what Scott was doing in poetry obviously influenced the Porters. So there’s some argument for a two-way street here. He was writing historical romance and verse, and they were obviously reading him. What they shared was an experience in Edinburgh using documentary and oral history as well as legend in the writing of new creative works. I do think Scott was looking at what the Porters were doing, how well they were selling, and taking that with him a dozen years later into Waverley. There are lots of reasons we could cite to explain why Waverley was a bestseller. Scott was masterful at that whole authorship mystery and crisis, right?
But I do think that he took from the Porters, as they believed, elements of their method without giving them credit. This was an era when people were borrowing from each other left, right, and center. I think all the Porters really wanted was for Scott to say “I was inspired by the sisters,” or “I learned from the sisters.” I don’t think they expected much more than that. But the more he resisted saying so publicly, for whatever reason—and there’s some sense that he just didn’t respect what they were doing very much—the more they started to be written out. It’s why we now say “Scott invented the historical novel” instead of “The Porters invented it.” Scott had better PR. He had a better machinery and a better story of authorship. He had all of the best reviews. He had the structure of literary authority behind him in ways that have everything to do with sex and also something to do with class and wealth. But I think it’s hard to say the reason Scott had more of a zeitgeist than the Porter sisters ended up having over the long term. They all had bestsellers.
BC: I guess what I’m also wondering is—a lot of their contemporaries seemed to judge Scott’s writing as more masculine, and I wonder if you know what they mean.
DL: The line that Anna Maria Porter uses angrily is that Scott can do history just fine, but when he tries to write about love, it’s…I think the line is “like water gruel.” She basically says he can’t do it. It’s thin and not believable. There’s something to that. I mean, I don’t know when you read Waverley if you feel much excitement about the love plot…
BC: Oh, not at all.
DL: There were some political differences, too. Scott complained that Jane Porter, in her Scottish Chiefs, turned William Wallace into a Christian gentleman. He found that problematic. I think her complaint about him would have been that he was writing on the side of the victors, and she was writing on the side of the underdogs, though I don’t know if she ever quite put it that way.
BC: What’s new in the world of the Porter legacy since Sister Novelists came out, and what work do you see ahead for scholars who wish to expand on it?
DL: I’m working with a team of students on an edition of a piece from Anna Maria Porter’s early life. She wrote two volumes of what she called Artless Tales, one at age fourteen and the second one around sixteen. A group of students and I are bringing out the second volume of Artless Tales with the Juvenilia Press. The fact that Anna Maria started publishing in her early teens is just remarkable and fascinating, and there hasn’t been a modern edition of this set of stories. I’m excited to be able to bring that out into the world; to have been able to do it with a team of students was especially amazing. I recommend Juvenilia Press for any teachers or professors reading this as a model to work with students—to teach them editing, annotation, research, and have a beautiful object at the end to show for it that hopefully has a life in the world beyond.
I hope that there will be much more work on the Porters. There is so much in the archival collections and in their unpublished letters that deserves to be unearthed. I have really only scratched the surface. It is crazy, the amount of information and material that is there for scholars of the eighteenth-century, Romantic, and Victorian periods to draw on in ways large and small. The New York Public Library, thanks to a collaboration with Arizona State University, has digitized its Porter papers, and those are now available for people to use and draw on. The Huntington Library now has virtual hours where you can…Do you know about this?
BC: No!
DL: You can set up a virtual appointment. I think they will allow you an hour a week where somebody will hold papers for you under a camera and turn the page for you to read. Obviously, you can only do a little bit at a time. But even somebody who lives very far away from the Huntington Library could call up some of the Porter papers and have an opportunity to read them from their own home under a camera.
BC: That’s really neat.
DL: So I hope there will be more people rather than fewer doing this kind of archival research. The forgotten women, especially, deserve to have a great remembering—but also this exciting, tumultuous, difficult, ugly era that has led us to where we are now deserves more people, rather than fewer, helping us to learn about the past.
Bethany Johnsen Creed is a PhD Candidate at UCLA and a Managing Editor of The Rambling. Her article on the formal strategies used by eighteenth-century women novelists to deflect criticism of their plots is forthcoming in English Literary History.
Devoney Looser is a writer and professor at Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of eleven books on the history of the novel, women’s writing, and Jane Austen—the most recent of which is Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës.