Anna Maria Porter

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Standard Name: Porter, Anna Maria
Birth Name: Anna Maria Porter
Pseudonym: A. P—r
Though she also wrote poetry and other genres, AMP 's name rests on her almost thirty historical romances (totalling 54 volumes). Many had US editions and French translations. She tends to focus on male rather than female relationships. Her settings range across European history and geography; she is interested in independence struggles, and supports an idealised version of rational, constitutional, British middle-class polity against tyranny on the one hand and barbarianism on the other. Her plots emphasize sentiment and morality and (like Sophia Lee 's The Recess) make national events a backdrop to private crises and intrigues. Though her earlier work was regularly judged inferior to that of her sister Jane , she became very successful.
Photograph of an engraving of Anna Maria Porter from a portrait by George Henry Harlow, c. 1805. She is seated, seen from the waist up, and seems to be wearing costume: a dress with puffed sleeves, a high collar that stands back from her shoulders, and a flower pinned in the centre of the bust. She holds a small stringed instrument in her lap, and her dark hair is pulled back and decorated with flowers. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Mary Robinson
An autopsy revealed six large gall-stones.
Highfill, Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.
13: 37
Though not much past forty, she had outlived all of her immediate family except her daughter and one brother. Jane Porter wrote an obituary intended for periodical...
death Jane Porter
JP died in Bristol, having outlived her younger sister, Anna Maria , by nearly twenty years, and having been some time in bad health.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge, 1989.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
269
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton, 1899.
88
Family and Intimate relationships Jane Porter
JP lived for most of her life with her younger sister, Anna Maria , who also became a writer.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
264-5
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge, 1989.
Friends, Associates Selina Davenport
Her tempestuous but close friendship with Jane and Anna Maria Porter began by the mid 1790s.
Looser, Devoney. Email to Isobel Grundy about Selina Davenport.
Her marriage caused a hiatus in this friendship, but it later resumed, and in any case with Jane it...
Friends, Associates Mary Robinson
After MR became known as the prince's mistress, the double standard in public morality made it virtually impossible for respectable women to treat her as a friend. Her admiration for Sarah Siddons was not reciprocated...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Isabella Spence
EIS says that her early friendship with Jane and Anna Maria Porter was inherited, developing from the friendship between their parents,
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817.
325-6
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
under Anna Maria Porter
which had been formed, no doubt, in Durham. In...
Friends, Associates Mary Lamb
One of those prepared to welcome her was Elizabeth Benger , who invited the brother and sister to tea, and was keen to get them back again to meet Jane and Anna Maria Porter ...
Friends, Associates Agnes Strickland
They began to build a network of literary friends and potential supporters: Thomas Campbell , Robert Southey , Charles Lamb , editor William Jerdan , and even more helpfully women like Barbara Hofland , Jane
Friends, Associates Harriet Lee
HL , like her sister, was personally friendly with many other writers of her day: Jane and Anna Maria Porter , Ann Radcliffe (even though the latter probably did not, as often reported, attend the...
Friends, Associates Sophia Lee
Their school, together with their literary careers, brought SL and her sisters a wide circle of friends and contacts, including Jane and Anna Maria Porter . The novelist Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins describes Sophia as surrounded...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley , who had already...
Friends, Associates Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny
MLCC mentions her warm friendships with leading officers of the Royal Navy , whom she knew through her husband's position. A number of writers too, including Mariana Starke , became her personal friends.
Crawford, Elizabeth. “Posts tagged Mariana Starke”. Woman and her Sphere.
2 November 2012
Leisure and Society Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny
Her patronage of authors shows up in subscriptions and dedications. She subscribed to works by Mary Deverell , Isabella Kelly , Eliza Parsons , Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson , and no doubt many more. Many of...
Literary responses Jane Porter
JP was, with her sister , one of those praised by John O'Keeffe in his poem Female Authors, Being an Answer to a Lady, who asserted, that by transmigration the soul of Shakespeare lived in...
Literary responses Fanny Holcroft
The Critical gave this novel a detailed notice starting from the proposition that FH had not had critical justice because of unfair comparisons with her eminent father. It praised the contrast in personality between the...

Timeline

2 July 1798
The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or polite repository of amusement and instruction published its first number. Sometimes called The Ladies' Monthly Museum . . . it ran until the 1830s.