‘What a Land is This!’ — The Pre-Oedipal Nation

Abstract

It has sometimes been claimed — though perhaps never more confidently than by the author herself — that Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810) are the first true historical novels.1 Family friend and countryman Sir Walter Scott is at any rate reported to have told George IV that the latter book, in particular, was the inspiration for the Waverley series, 2 and this long-popular work still does receive cursory mention in histories of the genre. 3