Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing

  • 24 Accesses

Definition

Jane Porter’s (1803) historical romance tells the story of a young Polish nobleman, Thaddeus Sobieski, who fights alongside historical Polish soldier, Tadeusz Kościuszko, to protect Poland from Russian invaders. After Poland’s subjugation by the forces of Catherine the Great, Thaddeus must leave Poland to begin a fresh life in Britain. Impoverished and alone in London, Thaddeus encounters prejudice as a foreigner, but his courage and kindness bring him to the attention of a number of women who, in a surprising role reversal, attempt to woo him. He must also solve the mystery of his birth by discovering and confronting the British father who abandoned him. Porter’s four-volume novel evokes the sentimentality of works by Samuel Richardson or Frances Burney (see “Burney [later d’Arblay], Frances [also Fanny]”), wherein a young woman must navigate the social challenges of the big city before uncovering the secret of her birth or finding true love. Porter’s hero, however, is...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Anon. 1804a. Review of Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter. 1804. Imperial Review (February):209–214.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1804b. Review of Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter. 1804. Monthly Review (February):214–215.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1818. Prodigious!!! Or Childe Paddie in London. 3 Vols. London: Wm. Lindsell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brunton, Mary. (1810) 1986. Self-control. New York: Pandora Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. 1858. The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 4 Vols. London: Moxon.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huntington Library Jane Porter Papers. 1804. POR 1504. Jane Porter to Anna Maria Porter, 3 April 1804.

    Google Scholar 

  • Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 1849. Kavanaugh. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, Jane. (1803) 2019. Thaddeus of Warsaw: A novel, ed. Thomas McLean and Ruth Knezevich. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1980. The letters and private papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 Vols. New York: Octagon Books.

    Google Scholar 

Further Reading

  • Looser, Devoney. 2005. Another Jane: Jane Porter, Austen’s Contemporary. In New windows on a woman’s world: Essays for Jocelyn Harris, ed. Colin Gibson and Lisa Marr, 2 Vols, 235–248. Dunedin: Department of English, University of Otago.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010. The Porter sisters, women’s writing, and historical fiction. In The history of British women’s writing, 1750–1830, ed. Jacqueline M. Labbe, 233–253. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. The great man and women’s historical fiction: Jane Porter and Sir Sidney Smith. Women’s Writing 19 (3): 294–314.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McLean, Thomas. 2007. Nobody’s argument: Jane Porter and the historical novel. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7 (2): 88–103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. The other east and nineteenth-century British literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2019. Introduction. In Thaddeus of Warsaw: A novel, ed. Thomas McLean and Ruth Knezevich, viii–xxiii. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Price, Fiona. 2006. Resisting ‘The Spirit of Innovation’: The other historical novel and Jane Porter. Modern Language Review 101 (3): 638–651.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rooney, Morgan. 2014. The French revolution debate and the British novel, 1790–1814: The struggle for history’s authority. Lanham: Bucknell UP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zapatka, Francis E. 1993. Jane Porter’s Kościuszko. In Heart of the nation: Polish literature and culture, III, ed. James S. Pula, M.B. Biskupski, and Thomas J. Napierkowski, 167–179. New York: East European Monographs.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hamline University, St. Paul, MN, USA

    Ruth Knezevich

Authors
  1. Ruth Knezevich
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Section Editor information

  1. University of Chichester, Chichester, UK

    Fiona Price

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Knezevich, R. (2022). Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_109-2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_109-2

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11945-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11945-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Chapter history

  1. Latest

    by Jane Porter
    Published:
    12 February 2024

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_109-3

  2. by Jane Porter
    Published:
    21 April 2022

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_109-2

  3. Original

    Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter
    Published:
    16 April 2021

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_109-1

Search

Navigation