Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës, was made possible by grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities (most recently through a Public Scholar Award); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center; the Huntington Library; the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection; the University of Kansas’s Spencer Library; the American Philosophical Society; a Big 12 Fellowship to KU; as well as support from Arizona State University (the Department of English, the Piper Center, and the College of Arts and Science) and the University of Missouri-Columbia (Research Council, Research Board, and Center for Arts and Humanities).
A staggering number of librarians and archivists also helped make this book possible. Those who’ve been with this project as stalwarts—over the course of many years and, in some cases, decades—have been more like consultants and research collaborators. Several provided sound advice and extraordinary pandemic help. Among those remarkable people I thank most heartily are Anne Barker, Joe Buenker, Gayle Richardson, Charles Carter, Karen Cook, Elizabeth Denlinger, Elspeth Healey, Kathy Lafferty, and Julian Pooley. I also thank family historian Vincent Gallagher for generously sharing via email his years of genealogical research on the Porter family and Prof. Joan Afferica for offering her deep expertise on the Shcherbatov family.
This book came into being thanks to the vision and support of my agent, Stacey Glick, and the heroic efforts of Bloomsbury’s production editor, Barbara Darko. Most importantly, this book owes its final shape to my brilliant editor, Grace McNamee, whose great talents I’ve had the pleasure of knowing since I met her when she was my undergraduate student at the University of Missouri. I’m honored to have had the chance to become her author-student in the making of this book.
Until quite recently, there weren't many of us working on the Porters. I was one of a handful of professors who presented papers on the Porter siblings in a small conference room at a Los Angeles hotel in 2011. We joked that day that if some natural disaster were to strike, a generation of Porter Studies could have been wiped out in an instant. Not that anyone would have noticed! Fortunately, we survived, and those three scholars—Anthony Jarrells, Thomas McLean, and Fiona Price—have produced work that's inspired and informed my own across many years. In the decade since then, illuminating new work on the Porters has appeared by Peta Beasley, John Bies, Sarah Faulkner, and Ruth Knezevich, among others. May the numbers of us dedicated to restoring the Porter sisters to literary history continue to grow.
I have previously thanked in print, over the years, my dear family and friends. I consider myself so fortunate that most of those loved ones continue to stand by my side today, as I hope I stand by theirs. Although they haven't been named in the pages of Sister Novelists, they know who they are, and their labor and support are behind each page of this book. Several of them even read every word of it in draft, and it was once a crazy number of words longer than the long book that emerged in print.
There's much about the Porter sisters' centuries-ago lives and unlikely careers that may be difficult to relate to today. Sometimes that's all for the better. But their undying gratitude—to mentors, friends, and each other—has inspired me from the first. It still does.
A staggering number of librarians and archivists also helped make this book possible. Those who’ve been with this project as stalwarts—over the course of many years and, in some cases, decades—have been more like consultants and research collaborators. Several provided sound advice and extraordinary pandemic help. Among those remarkable people I thank most heartily are Anne Barker, Joe Buenker, Gayle Richardson, Charles Carter, Karen Cook, Elizabeth Denlinger, Elspeth Healey, Kathy Lafferty, and Julian Pooley. I also thank family historian Vincent Gallagher for generously sharing via email his years of genealogical research on the Porter family and Prof. Joan Afferica for offering her deep expertise on the Shcherbatov family.
This book came into being thanks to the vision and support of my agent, Stacey Glick, and the heroic efforts of Bloomsbury’s production editor, Barbara Darko. Most importantly, this book owes its final shape to my brilliant editor, Grace McNamee, whose great talents I’ve had the pleasure of knowing since I met her when she was my undergraduate student at the University of Missouri. I’m honored to have had the chance to become her author-student in the making of this book.
Until quite recently, there weren't many of us working on the Porters. I was one of a handful of professors who presented papers on the Porter siblings in a small conference room at a Los Angeles hotel in 2011. We joked that day that if some natural disaster were to strike, a generation of Porter Studies could have been wiped out in an instant. Not that anyone would have noticed! Fortunately, we survived, and those three scholars—Anthony Jarrells, Thomas McLean, and Fiona Price—have produced work that's inspired and informed my own across many years. In the decade since then, illuminating new work on the Porters has appeared by Peta Beasley, John Bies, Sarah Faulkner, and Ruth Knezevich, among others. May the numbers of us dedicated to restoring the Porter sisters to literary history continue to grow.
I have previously thanked in print, over the years, my dear family and friends. I consider myself so fortunate that most of those loved ones continue to stand by my side today, as I hope I stand by theirs. Although they haven't been named in the pages of Sister Novelists, they know who they are, and their labor and support are behind each page of this book. Several of them even read every word of it in draft, and it was once a crazy number of words longer than the long book that emerged in print.
There's much about the Porter sisters' centuries-ago lives and unlikely careers that may be difficult to relate to today. Sometimes that's all for the better. But their undying gratitude—to mentors, friends, and each other—has inspired me from the first. It still does.