Though a popular novelist in her day, Anna Maria Porter, unlike her older sister Jane, neither deserved nor achieved lasting fame. Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1810), still in print today, has reached British and American readers in more than one hundred editions and printings. The Hungarian Brothers (1807), Anna Maria Porter's most-popular novel, saw the last of its roughly sixteen editions and printings in 1850. George Saintsbury attributes her diminished reputation, fairly, to her "amiable incompetence." Yet Porter was an influential author. Her novels articulate the spiritual progress of essentially good characters in a corrupting world. This scheme--which justified the novel in a period when, for moral reasons, it was not universally approved--appealed particularly to members of the Anglican Evangelical movement, the core of Porter's audience, who helped to form public expectations for early nineteenth-century fiction. So Porter's novels warrant renewed attention.

The youngest of five children, Anna Maria Porter...