Writing to her sister in 1821, Jane Porter makes a claim concerning her influence on Scott, which she repeats in the 1831 Standard Novels edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw. Recounting a conversation between ‘Sir Andrew Haliday’, the King and Walter Scott on the ‘admiration’ felt for Tales of my Landlord and Waverley, she has ‘Haliday’ interject:

In Porter's letter, Scott's ‘I grant it’ occurs at the end of a line. Along with the reporting clause, ‘replied Sir Walter’, this lends emphasis to Scott's affirmation; without these devices, his remarks dwindle to a polite nothing of good-natured agreement. The element of wish-fulfilment in Porter's remarks reflects her growing annoyance: the success of Ivanhoe followed hard on the failure of her play ‘Switzerland’ in 1819. When Porter writes in relation to her sister's novel, The Knight of St John, A Romance (1817), ‘Surely this Great Author, does not keep his hands from picking & stealing’, her frustration is thus understandable but inaccurate. No one who reads The Knight alongside Ivanhoe could accuse Scott of plagiarism. However, the novels share a focus on Judaism, an urgent drive to adapt the chivalric, a motif of national healing and a stadial approach to historical narrative. Scott is in dialogue with other historical fictions. But such dialogue is forgotten. Porter laments how one reviewer of Ivanhoe suggests that ‘the universal merits of “Ivanhoe” as a romance, by embracing all subjects of romance, set at nought all romances which had ever been written’. Her wording, ‘set at nought’, suggests an erasure that Peter Garside also remarks on. From the 1820s, the reviewers, who had initially compared Scott's works to other romances, tended to view him as ‘the founder of a new historical fiction’ and to compare him (not always favourably) to himself.

For Garside, Waverley 's ‘relation to other contemporary novels’ still ‘invites reappraisal’. Yet, although it is well established that the title Waverley refers to historical novels by Charlotte Smith and Jane West, the role of earlier historical fiction in shaping Scott's fiction remains obscure.