Join JASNA Southwest as it welcomes special guest Dr. Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, who will give us a preview of her new book on the Porter sisters, Jane and Anna Marie, which will be released on Sept. 6. Devoney has authored or edited nine books on literature by women. . Her book The Making of Jane Austen was named a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book (nonfiction). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon and Slate. She's also played roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen and served as plenary speaker at multiple JASNA Annual General Meetings. Devoney earned her PhD in English, with certification in women's studies, from SUNY Stony Brook, N.Y., and graduated summa cum laude from Augsburg College in Minneapolis with an English Honors BA.

Dr. Looser has been a frequent and popular lecturer at JASNA events across the country and has presented before JASNA Southwest many times in the past.

From the publisher (Bloomsbury USA):

Jane and Anna Maria Porter—exact contemporaries of Jane Austen—were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family’s considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for any biographers to come.

But history hasn’t been kind to the Porters. Their literary reputation gradually fell away, their letters languished, and no biographer materialized for a century and a half. Now, Professor Devoney Looser, a Guggenheim fellow in English Literature, sets out to re-introduce the world to the authors who cleared the way for Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters.

Capturing the Porter sisters’ incredible rise, from when Anna Maria published her first book at age 14 in 1793, through to Jane’s fall from the pinnacle of fame in the Victorian era, and then to the auctioning off for a pittance of the family’s massive archive, Sister Novelists is a groundbreaking and enthralling biography of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction.

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Please be sure to visit our website

JASNASW.COM

for further information as well as updates for this and future events.

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