Devoney Looser

Magic City Books is thrilled to welcome Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, for an in person event to celebrate her new book, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontes.

This free event will take place in the Algonquin Room at Magic City Books on Monday, November 14 at 7:00 pm.

“Reading Devoney Looser’s Sister Novelists is like stepping into an Austen novel where one can vividly participate in the world full of love and angst that sisters, friends, lovers, and family endure only to realize that this is not a novel, but reality.”—Damianne Scott of Black Girl Loves Jane 

Sister Novelists will be published on October 25. You can pre-order a copy to have signed and shipped after the event in the store or online at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/sister-novelists/913. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

About Sister Novelists

Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. Exact contemporaries of Jane Austen, the Porters were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family’s considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for biographers to come.

But history hasn’t been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters’ works as his inspiration. Now, Professor Devoney Looser, a Guggenheim fellow in English Literature, sets out to re-introduce the world to the authors who cleared the way for Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters. Capturing the Porter sisters’ incredible rise, from when Anna Maria published her first book at age 14 in 1793, through to Jane’s fall from the pinnacle of fame in the Victorian era, and then to the auctioning off for a pittance of the family’s massive archive, Sister Novelists is a groundbreaking and enthralling biography of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction.

Devoney Looser is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author or editor of nine books on literature by women, including The Making of Jane Austen. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, and she’s had the pleasure of talking about Austen on CNN. Looser, who has played roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen, is a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.