gain income from it, she resorted to ostensibly new editions published with prefaces and minor changes. She applied unsuccessfully for a literary pension, and being personally "totally destitute or nearly so", had to move between homes of her friends. Porter contributed to periodicals and wrote the play Switzerland (1819), which seems to have been deliberately sabotaged by its lead, Edmund Kean, and closed after its first performance. She is sometimes associated with the 1822 production Owen, Prince of Powys, which closed after only three performances, but this was actually by Samson Penley. Porter also wrote Tales Round a Winter Hearth (1821), Coming Out (1828) and The Field of Forty Footsteps (1828) with her sister, Anna Maria.. A romance, Sir Edward Seaward's Diary (1831), purporting to record actual circumstances and edited by Jane, was written by her brother, Dr William Ogilvie Porter, as letters in the University of Durham Porter archives show. In her later years, Porter continued to write pieces for journals. Many appeared anonymously or were simply signed "J. P." Her wide-ranging topics included Peter the Great, Simón Bolívar, and the African explorer Dixon Denham. Influences Porter, like many contemporaries, was fascinated by Lord Byron. The villain in The Pastor's Fireside, Duke Wharton, has been said to cast "an unmistakably Byronic shadow". Additional influences on her writing included her schoolmaster George Fulton, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. She in turn influenced writers in her time. References External links Porter Family Collection at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas Episode on Jane and Anna Maria Porter, with biographer Devoney Looser, at What'sHerName Podcast Jane Porter biographies Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (Jane and Maria Porter) by Devoney Looser (2022) reformation.org indiana.edu british-fiction.cf.ac.uk What'sHerName Podcast 1776 births 1850 deaths Scottish women novelists 19th-century Scottish writers 19th-century British women writers Scottish historical novelists Women historical novelists Women of the Regency era Writers of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages Writers of historical fiction set in the early modern period