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Jane Porter (1776-1850), was born in the Bailey in Durham City. It was said that she used to rise at four in the morning in order to read and write. She read the whole of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene while still a child. Reputedly tall and beautiful as she grew up, her grave and preoccupied air earned her the nickname 'La Penseroso', possibly a reference recalling the poem 'Il Penseroso' by John Milton ,meaning 'A brooding or melancholy person or personality'. After her father's death, the family moved to Edinburgh, where Walter Scott was a regular visitor. Some time afterward the family moved to London, where the sisters became acquainted with a number of literary women: Elizabeth Inchbald, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Mrs De Crespigny. Her novel Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) is one of the earliest examples of the historical novel, and it went through a dozen editions. Based on eye-witness accounts from Polish refugees of the doomed independence struggle of the 1790s, the book was praised by the great Polish patriot Kosciusko. The Scottish Chiefs (1810) a novel about William Wallace, was also a success, (the French version was banned by Napoleon) and it has remained popular with Scottish children. She wrote a number of novels, as well as two plays, which were less successful. She also contributed to various periodicals. A romance, Sir Edward Seaward's Diary (1831), purporting to be a record of actual circumstances, and edited by Jane, is generally believed to have been written by a brother, Dr. William Ogilvie Porter. Jane and Anna Maria Porter, who both lived in London and Surrey later on, were sisters of Sir Robert Ker Porter, the historical painter.
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