Porter, JANE

Porter, JANE, authoress of the Scottish Chiefs, was born at Durham in 1776, daughter of an army-surgeon who died soon after her birth. She was brought up at Edinburgh and in London, and made a great reputation in 1803 by her high-flown romance, Thaddeus of Warsaw, which was distanced in its kind in 1810 by The Scottish Chiefs. The hero of the latter is a stilted and preposterous figure enough—as little of the historical Wallace as could well be, yet the book retains its interest for youthful readers, and had the merit of prompting Scott to complete Waverley. Other books were The Pastor's Fireside (1815), Duke Christian of Lüneburg (1824), Tales Round a Winter's Hearth (in collaboration with her sister Anna Maria, 1824), The Field of Forty Footsteps (1828), and Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative of his Shipwreck and Consequent Discovery of Certain Islands in the Caribbean Sea (1831), a clever fiction, edited by her, but almost certainly written by her eldest brother, Dr William Ogilvie Porter (cf. Notes and Queries, 1880). With this brother she spent some years at Bristol, and there she died, 24th May 1850.—Another brother, ROBERT KER PORTER (1775-1842), was a clever battle-painter, and led a wandering life. He visited Russia on the emperor's commission in 1804, accompanied Sir John Moore's expedition in 1808, became knight commander of the order of Hanover in 1832, was afterwards British consul in Venezuela, and died at St Petersburg, whither his sister Jane had gone to join him, 4th May 1845. He published books of travel in Russia, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Georgia, Persia, and Armenia.—Her younger sister, ANNA MARIA PORTER (1780-1832), blossomed precociously into Artless Tales (1793-95), followed by a long series of works, among which need only be named Octavia (1798), The Lake of Killarney (1804), The Hungarian Brothers (1807), The Recluse of Norway (1814), The Fast of St Magdalen (1818), Honor O'Hara (1826), and Barony (1830).