The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers by Lindsay Eckert, and: Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers by Lindsay Eckert, and: Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser Stephanie Insley Hershinow Lindsay Eckert, The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers ( Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 258; 6 b/w, 3 color illus. $120.00 cloth, $34.95 paper. Devoney Looser, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës ( New York: Bloomsbury, 2022). Pp. 576; 16 pp. insert. $30.00 cloth. How did Romantic writers imagine their readers? How did Romantic readers imagine those writers? Scholars working in book history and on print culture, on celebrity and on reception have illuminated our understanding of the relationships between artists, their intimates, and their admirers. It is no longer considered anachronistic to talk of the "fandoms" that grew around certain illustrious figures; rather, historicizing such subcultures is understood to be a mission worthy of serious study. The two books under consideration in this review tackle these questions via different genres and at different scales. Lindsay Eckert's The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers is a monograph, a study of the thorny subject of "familiarity" in Romantic-era writing and culture. Devoney Looser's Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës is a biography—the first, somehow—of Jane and Maria Porter, prolific writers whose names were well known in Regency parlors as both celebrated authors and as subjects of rumor and speculation. Eckert offers an expansive view of the era, treating both the usual suspects (like Wordsworth and Byron) and those less often analyzed in their own right (like Lady Caroline Lamb or Hazlitt-as-novelist). Zooming in on a single case, Looser shapes the scattered but extensive correspondence between Jane and Maria Porter into an immersive account that tracks a single family but also, given the sisters' many famous and infamous correspondents, opens up to capture their broader milieu. Read together, [End Page 107] Looser and Eckert give us a complex, enticing picture of Romantic celebrity—one that expands the terrain beyond the stories we're used to. Eckert argues that successful authorship in the Romantic era depended on the careful navigation of challenging expectations about how best to establish connections—in and outside of the printed text—between authors and readers. One way to think of Eckert's study is as a prehistory of parasocial relationships (though this is not a term she employs). Social media has, as countless op-eds have warned us, encouraged fans to foster unhealthy relationships to celebrities they have never actually met (and likely never will meet). The seemingly direct access granted by social media can appear to flatten hierarchies (or, put more optimistically, to democratize), granting unprecedented entry into the personal lives of artists, making private lives public. We've learned to call these relationships "parasocial," a term that feels uniquely appropriate to the twenty-first century even though it was coined in 1956 by D. Horton and R. R. Wohl. Eckert reveals a much earlier genealogy of the concept, showing how Romantic authors crafted their own celebrity by fostering the impression of intimacy with readers while, at the same time, attempting to avoid the charge of indecorous overfamiliarity. Take the fans who wrote letters to Byron. His poetry seemed to respond to audience reactions in a new way, not only producing the appearance of personal correspondence or direct address to his readership, but turning that seeming correspondence into art. The poetic project, Eckert shows us, was daring not least because it pushed against the limits of social and class boundaries that theories of familiarity attempted to police. Eckert takes up "familiarity," an overdetermined term no less useful for its multiple tricky valences in this period. The term is more complex than it may at first appear. Not only can "familiarity" conjure the closeness of domestic life, it can also describe a style of writing that assumes the easiness of conversation between old friends. (The "familiar letter" exemplifies this style, but print genres of all kinds increasingly drew...