(1)
It is known that ideas are on the side of the road, we all go through them, the skilled ones are the ones who are good at catching them and dealing with them, unlike others who pass in silence, important ideas do not need lacy covers to attract attention, intelligence is to turn the ordinary into amazing, this is if you are a fan of stories, The Porter sisters are an example.
Perhaps Anna Maria did not know that the tales of grandmothers that she recorded at an age between childhood and youth would be the first building block in our modern history of the world of the historical novel, the interesting tale that contains history in a novel and beloved way that the reader does not get tired of.
(2)
Anna Maria Porter was born in 1780 in Durham County, which was affiliated with Scotland at the time, to become the fifth child in the family of a doctor who passed away shortly after her birth. She excels in school when she is only 5 years old.
She is fond of the stories of grandmothers, but rather of all women who are older than her. She goes out of her house every day to sit in front of one of them, enjoying the stories they tell about the history of Scotland, villages, cities and towns.
Many are the ones who listen to her, but she alone does something different. She begins to write and write down the stories she listens to, and continues to do so until she reaches the age of 13, so that what she has becomes sufficient to publish a book entitled "Non-Artistic Stories."
The grandmothers' stories did not end at this point, and Anna Maria was not satisfied with what she heard, so she learned more and more from them, and during the next two years she had finished writing the second part of her first book, recording and documenting old stories from the history of the town and the village.
(3)
Perhaps Anna Maria did not know that the tales of grandmothers that she recorded when she was between childhood and youth would be the first building block in our modern history of the world of the historical novel, the interesting tale that contains history in a novel and beloved way that the reader never gets tired of.
Only 15 years was enough for the girl to enter the world of writers and authors with two books that everyone will love. Who among us does not love grandmothers and their honest stories, and the warm spirit emanating from them.
Her older sister, Jane, was not absent from all of this, as both of them gathered on the love of stories and tales and their narration, and a kind of alliance and agreement began to arise between them to write stories in their various forms.
The family moves to London, and Anna Maria decides to continue writing this type of novel, to combine historical writing with fictional fiction, so Walsh Coliville was printed for her, and the reaction was mixed, as the British public was not accustomed to the narrator as an acceptable literary art, but Religious groups in London accept the narrator, considering the direction in which the story of the hero, being an upright young man, resisted being drawn towards evil, and committed himself to the path of goodness.
In 1798, another novel entitled Octavia was published, but the reactions this time were not in her favour. Many dealt with it as a novel only, without praise or slander, while some advised her to stay away from writing novels and pay attention to something more important.
Anna Maria writes two novels later that have almost no success, so she decides to stop and immerse herself in writing a novel that compensates for all of that, so that in 1807 she publishes the novel "The Hungarian Brothers", in which she dealt with a romantic story that intersects with the events of the French Revolution, to combine again between the novel and history.
The novel succeeded greatly, and achieved a wide spread. Rather, it became one of its most successful and widespread novels. It was also translated into French, and came out in several editions due to the high demand for it.
(4)
Four years earlier, her older sister Jane had entered the line, issuing her first novel, in which she also combined real historical events with the pleasant plot. Her novel (Thaddeus of Warsaw) included eyewitness accounts of British soldiers and Polish refugees fleeing from an invasion of their country in the year 1790. .
It seemed that what the two sisters were doing was strange and new to British society, and some even claimed that they invented a new type of literature and writing in which they pioneered, which is documenting history from the point of view of drama.
Writer and novelist Jane Porter (Getty Images)
At this time, the pleasure of the British was to follow theatrical performances, sometimes in spacious halls without a roof, with theater groups with limited capabilities, quoting their works from the novels of the book, and presenting them on stage, amid the attention and cries of the masses who applauded with love and admiration sometimes, or throwing insults and leftovers at the actors sometimes.
The gate through which the Porter sisters crossed was what was presented in the plays, but from the gate of history, far from the writings of Shakespeare that dominated the conscience of Europeans in general and the British in particular in that era.
Jane feels nostalgic for Scotland and writes about it, so she writes her new novel in the year 1810, whose heroes were a group of heroic fighters in Scotland, who fought real events and fierce battles for their land, and incorporated fictional characters and romantic stories into the novel, and armed with all the elements that the novel needed to be strong enough.
And because the novels of the two sisters are imbued with many calls for freedom, revolution, and breaking the restrictions imposed by tyrants, France at the time of Napoleon considered Jane’s novel (Thaddeus of Warsaw) a threat to the authority of government, so it banned its publication in all French cities, and the ban applied to all her and her sister’s novels as a threat For the security of power, and an advocate for revolution and rebellion.
(5)
In 1814, 65 books were published in Britain, and Anna Maria had a novel (The Recluse of Norway), which dealt with historical stories and romantic events about Governor Theodore and the nobles surrounding him in his palace.
Anna Maria did not imagine that the novel would succeed in such a way that it competed with the famous novels that were published in the same year.
In those years there was a famous British poet and novelist known as Walter Scott, and he was awarded the Poet of Great Britain, but unfortunately he was one of the most prominent who entered into a dispute with the Porter sisters, as he published a novel called "Waverley", in which he quoted what he quoted from the events Their published accounts, according to Ana Maria, who sent to her sister to tell her angrily about it.
Scott completely refuses to admit the matter, so Jane decides to take revenge in her own way, and after 12 years she publishes a short story about a person named "Nobody" in which she mocks Scott and his plagiarism, likening him to being Nobody, as she named the protagonist.
The result was that many of the literary community in Britain rallied behind Scott, attacking Jane, accusing her of being a liar and doomed to oblivion while Scott's glory would always endure.
(6)
The crisis intensifies for Jane and Anna Maria, and they lose much of the success they had obtained, and poverty begins to strike their lives harshly, as they no longer have anything to live a good life with, until June of 1832, when Anna Maria becomes infected with typhus and dies quickly.
Only 3 months after the death of Anna Maria, Walter Scott dies, after which one of the strangest paradoxes occurs, as Scott's supporters sought to launch a fundraising campaign to preserve his private library after his death, preserve his home, and invited Jane, who at that time was living a life of poverty and bankruptcy, and she moves from time to time between the empty rooms in which she is allowed to reside in the homes of her friends and acquaintances.
Jane responds to the invitation, and donates the last of her possessions at that time, to contribute to protecting the legacy of Scott, whom she did not consider an enemy, but rather considered a childhood and youth companion.
Scott's fans and admirers set up in 1840 a wonderful tower to celebrate his memory in Edinburgh, Scotland, ignoring all the accusations of plagiarism against him, while Jane continued to suffer a life of poverty until 1850, when she died in May, and after her death her remaining papers were sold in An auction in which only small sums were paid by those who still remember her and her late sister at the time.
Among the papers sold at auction were thousands of letters between Jane and her sister Anna Maria, which were distributed among a large number of libraries in the world years after her death, while her novels after her death became very popular in the United States and sold millions of copies.
The march of Jane and Anna Maria was the door that paved the way for two of the most important female novelists in modern history, Charlotte Bronte, the wonderful "Jane Eyre", and Jane Austen, the wonderful "Pride and Vanity", who have succeeded over the years in presenting a group of the most beautiful novels. in history.