The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance was written by Jane Porter. Porter (1776-1850) was a Scottish novelist. (She was born in England but lived in Edinburgh from age three). She was a significant predecessor to Walter Scott in writing historical novels; her historicals remained in print throughout the nineteenth century.

There was a historical William Wallace (c.1270-1305), a Scottish national hero who rebelled against the rule of King Edward I.

The Scottish Chiefs is a romanticized biography of William Wallace. Wallace’s wife, Lady Wallace, is brutally murdered while he is still a young man, and Wallace, who worships his wife, is devastated, so much so that he ignores the many young women who he rescues and who find him handsome and brave. Wallace eventually builds an army capable of defeating the forces of Edward Longshanks and helps to give Scotland her freedom. However, several years later Wallace is betrayed and given to the English, and dies in the Tower of London. The novel ends with the victory of Robert the Bruce over Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

The Scottish Chiefs was Porter’s most popular novel and was greatly loved in Scotland for many years. Porter’s version of Wallace as a parfait knight, chivalrous, merciful, handsome and brave, is appealing in abstract terms, and her warping of history is done much more innocently than that of Gogol (see: Taras Bulba) or Sienkiewicz (see: With Fire and Sword). And several editions of the novel are gorgeously illustrated; N.C. Wyeth’s are particularly lovely. But in most other ways The Scottish Chiefs is a crashing bore. Its language is dense, archaic and difficult. The novel is a more flowery version of Boy’s Own history, with real people reduced to one-dimensional caricatures and the messiness of history reduced to the idiotic simplicity of bad adventure fiction. Most readers will be bored by Porter’s obsession with the Scottish struggle for independence. And Porter’s hagiography of Wallace will drive the bored reader into rooting for Wallace’s defeat and death.

However, The Scottish Chiefs is notable as the most important historical romance published before Walter Scott’s work. When Porter wrote The Scottish Chiefs the dominant version of the historical novel was the Gothic, in which authors (many of whom were women) wrote novels with vaguely historical settings and the Gothic plot machinery of terror. Porter is the transitional author between these writers and Scott, whose Waverley novels (see: Waverley) created the modern historical romance. Porter attempted to adhere to the historical record in her fiction, and although she paid no more attention to local culture and characterization than did her predecessors, she did create an appreciation in the reading public for historical novels which were about actual history rather than fictional times and places. Moreover, Porter’s purpose in writing The Scottish Chiefs was not just to entertain but to guide her readers; she claimed not just “political authority in her writing, but the particular moral authority she attached to her historical romances.”¹ The audience’s response to The Scottish Chiefs confirmed Porter’s view of herself. Lastly, Porter’s incorporation elements of traditional heroic romances in The Scottish Chiefs “necessarily effects a revisionist view of history that glorifies and upholds Britain’s political past”²—which English audiences also responded positively to.

Scott (who was a Porter family friend) did not think highly of The Scottish Chiefs. He said “Lord help us! Her Wallace is no more our Wallace than Lord Peter is,”³ and The Scottish Chiefs served only as a negative inspiration for Waverley. Scott’s negative reaction was likely borne out of sexism rather than any objective analysis: "His protests read very much as from an author who feels both personally and professional that the genres of history and national identity belong to men...possibly, too, Scott dismisses Porter because he could be too readily compared to her as an author of historical novels that, until the publication of Waverley, were considered, like all novel writing, a female domain."⁴

Print: Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance. London: Forgotten Books, 2017.

¹ Lisa Kasmer, Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830 (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 93.

² Kasmer, Novel Histories, 98.

³ Qtd. in Peta Beasley, “Transporting Genres: Jane Porter Delivers the Historical Novel to the Victorians,” in Sue Thomas, ed., Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 218.

⁴ Beasley, “Transporting Genres,” 218.