Thaddeus Ever Valiant

There’s always the hope that there might remain a brilliant female writer from the 1700s or early 1800s who has been lost to obscurity. That’s why, over the years, I go back once in a while to read someone new to me.

One of these is Jane Porter, who along with her sister Maria became lost to all but the most assiduous readers of early English literature. Their times, lives, and works are wonderfully captured by Devoney Looser in her 2022 book. I review this work, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës, here.

The Porter sisters invented the historical novel and then were pushed aside by the popularity of Walter Scott’s Scottish stories. They sold millions of books but ended up poor. Their brothers not only failed to support them, as brothers were expected to do—as Jane Austen’s brothers did—but they also often drained their sisters’ sizable earnings without much seeming care.

Jane and Maria tottered on destitution their entire lives. Literarily, they were largely forgotten.

I was intrigued at the idea of reading Jane Porter’s first historical novel, Thaddeus of Warsaw, if only because it seemed so unusual a topic for an English author, female or male. At times, it was a slog. At other times, it was heartfelt. In addition to the admirable Thaddeus, a valiant Polish patriot who finds himself alone and penniless in England after his side loses a war to Russian and Prussian armies, we also have Mary Beaufort, a thoughtful, compassionate woman whose natural strength falters, as always with romantic heroines, in the presence of her man.

Other characters tend to be much too bad or too good, sometimes just to create or resolve conflict. For women of virtue, including Thaddeus’s mother, their innocence must of course lead to heartbreak, betrayal, and buckets of remorseful tears.

Thaddeus of Warsaw: Almost like a medieval romance with a peerless knight.

Good things about Thaddeus include the audacity of the story and the amount of research required, including the “close questioning” of Polish exiles and others who knew anything about the subject. Unlike Austen, who leaves the reader standing contentedly in the lane when Emma visits the poor, Porter drops the reader directly into scenes of poverty and squalor. She also starkly highlights the superior attitudes of the “patrician order” toward lower classes, observing that “great merit may exist without being associated with great rank” and that people “treat with affected scorn him whom they secretly fear.”

Porter is capable of some lovely phrasing, including: the sad letter “was blistered with his mother’s tears”; “reflection is the alchemy which turns knowledge into wisdom”; “any chance of passing unnoticed in company I dislike is worth retaining.” She writes of “that piercing tenderness which at once dissolves and assures the soul.” Often her language is overly broad, typical of the grandiose style of the period (except Austen), but at times Porter can be brief and sharp: “the little sail gave bosom to the wind,” she writes, while Thaddeus deals with “these scorpion reproaches in his bosom.”

Thaddeus is genuinely moving during Thaddeus’s depression at the loss of family and country, and his near starvation in London—he ends up indebted to his poverty-stricken landlady! The book shows his resolve to climb to livable wage.

At the same time, the hero is an exemplar, too perfect for belief. If we are not convinced by his war exploits and his saint-like decency to all, he further rescues children from a fire in London. Rich or poor, he causes every woman to swoon and every man to admire or hate him.

At heart, Thaddeus is a romance. There’s the usual motif of the unknown parentage that conveniently restores his wealth. The usual presentation of the worthy but poor protagonist is reversed because Thaddeus is a shown as a member of a wealthy family early on. However, his fortune is lost, and for most of his time in England his identity as a count is unknown. The result is that we have the same “reveal” at the end. The book also sadly contains the reflexive antisemitism of the period: “the Jew, who being a low, sordid wretch,” looked upon his customers “as mere purveyors to his profit.”

As in most poorly structured novels of the day, coincidences abound—including the number of well-to-do Londoners who wander through or near his poor quarters. One minor character, mentioned a few times throughout and seen perhaps once, turns out to be the cause, for apparently minor reasons, of most of Thaddeus’s continuing misfortunes in England.

Though she supports Polish independence from other European powers, Porter does not support Polish democracy. She criticizes failed efforts to overthrow the king by some Polish leaders, including Casimir Pulaski, and writes gleefully of his fleeing “to the wretched life of an outlaw and an exile” in America. US citizens may disagree, as he supported the colonies’ independence by training cavalry, saving George Washington’s life, and ultimately dying during an attack against Britain positions. My home county in Arkansas is named in his honor.

The sweep of Porter’s saga is marvelous when compared to others, including especially Austen. Readers can enjoy the tale, Thaddeus’s many struggles, and his ultimate reward of love and money—as long as they realize they’re reading something like a medieval romance featuring a knight in shining armor. A good tale, if readers can wade through a few sections included just to show off Porter’s historical knowledge.

There are many women writers who have been rediscovered, dusted off, and added to the modern literary tradition. Jane Porter is one. She’s worth the wait.

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My new book, Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in “a Style Entirely New,” investigates her development as a writer and shows how her innovations as a prose stylist set the course for modern fiction. It is available from Jane Austen Books at a special low price.

The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen is also available from Jane Austen Books and Amazon. The trilogy traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions. A “boxed set” that combines all three in an e-book format is also available.