Jane Porter

Born in Durham in the late 18th century and raised mainly in Edinburgh after her father's death, Jane Porter became one of the best-known novelists of her day. She came from a strikingly talented family: her sister Anna Maria Porter was also a novelist, and her brother Robert Ker Porter became a noted artist and traveler.

Porter is best remembered for Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810), books that won a wide readership and were admired for blending history, adventure, and strong feeling. She is often described as an important early historical novelist, because her fiction helped establish the kind of large-scale, past-set storytelling that became hugely popular in the 19th century.

Alongside her novels, she wrote plays and other prose, and she remained an active literary figure throughout her life. Even though she is less widely read now than some of her successors, her work still matters for its role in the development of historical fiction and for the energy and emotion that first drew readers to it.