Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Hester Mulso Chapone
-
Standard Name: Chapone, Hester Mulso
Birth Name: Hester Mulso
Married Name: Hester Chapone
Nickname: Yes Papa
Nickname: Heck
Pseudonym: Y
Pseudonym: G.
Indexed Name: Hester Mulso Chapone
Used Form: Mrs Chapone
As a young woman Hester Mulso (later HMC
) was a forceful arguer against social injustice meted out to women, but her enduring reputation as a writer and Bluestocking is as a staid, conservative moralist and dispenser of advice. She wrote letters, essays, poems, and conduct literature.
Though most of her letters to Samuel Richardson
are mainly domestic in content, those of the 1750s (on the composition of his novels and all kinds of gender issues arising from that) may quite fairly...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
The many pictures in the volume include diagrams of the hold of a slave ship, I & Dash my Dog (a sketch), and prints of Hester Mulso Chapone
, Lady Rachel Russell
(with a copy...
Textual Features
Eliza Fenwick
For this anthology EF
gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare
and Milton
, as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton
and Helen Maria Williams
...
Textual Features
Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
Textual Features
Sarah Green
The tone of the work is conservative, leavened with an intelligent concern for development of independent thinking. Topics of various letters include Conduct and Conversation, Forbearance, Chastity, Truth, Employment of Time...
Textual Features
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The title of the Blackstick Papers alludes to the character of the Fairy Blackstick from her father
's Rose and the Ring: she places her essays under the kindly tutelage
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Blackstick Papers. Books for Libraries Press.
3-4
of this spirit...
Reception
Catherine Talbot
Present-day critics like Stuart Curran
think highly of CT
as a poet. Rhoda Zuk
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography praises her as a feminist and a rational moralist, and argues that the dismissal...
The original press run of 1,018 copies had to be supplemented with a further 250. First of several more editions was the Dublin one of the...
Publishing
Elizabeth Bentley
1,935 copies of the book were subscribed for. Names on the list include those of BluestockingsElizabeth Carter
and Hester Mulso Chapone
, William Cowper
, and a number of those men who later wrote...
Publishing
Mary Wollstonecraft
It was dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand
, a supporter of the Revolution and the reputed lover of Germaine de Staël
. She produced a second, revised edition by the end of the year...
Edward Moore
's periodical The World mooted the extraordinary concept of EC
as principal of an Oxford
or Cambridge
college: this number may be by Hester Mulso Chapone
.
The World. R. and J. Dodsley.
131: 790
Occupation
Elizabeth Carter
The essay may well be by Hester Mulso, later Chapone
. Like most fantasies of women as Members of Parliament and so forth, this is humorous, ambivalent, and carefully distanced from reality. It is a...