Tall and beautiful as she grew up, young Jane Porter's grave air earned her the nickname La Penserosa after John Milton's poem Il Penseroso.

[4] Porter is seen to have "crafted and pioneered many of the narrative tools most commonly associated with both the national tale and the historical novel,"[5] though her claims in her lifetime to have done so were often ridiculed and dismissed.

[10] 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.

[11] Porter also wrote Tales Round a Winter Hearth (1826) and Coming Out; and The Field of Forty Footsteps (1828) with her sister, Anna Maria.

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.

[14] Additional influences on her writing included her schoolmaster George Fulton, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.