Hannah More

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Standard Name: More, Hannah
Birth Name: Hannah More
Nickname: Nine
Pseudonym: A Young Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of Percy
Pseudonym: H. M.
Pseudonym: Will Chip, a Carpenter
During her long and phenomenally productive career HM wrote plays, poems, a single novel and much social, religious, and political commentary. She was the leading conservative and Christian moralist of her day. Her political opinions were reactionary, and her passionate commitment to educating the poor and lessening their destitution has been judged as marred by its paternalist tone. But she was a pioneer educator and philanthropist, with enormous influence on the Victorian age.
Orlando gratefully acknowledges help with this document from Mary Waldron. Any flaws or errors are, of course, not hers.
Photograph of a painting of Hannah More by Henry William Pickersgill, 1822. She is seated on a red-upholstered chair beside a little table draped in red fabric and bearing a quill pen, inkwell, and piece of paper. She wears a blue-green mantle with V neck and creamy fabric at the cuffs and neckline, finished with a ruff around her neck. She has a gold shawl and a cap topped with pale blue ribbons. More wrote that she was "condemned, sorely against her will," to sit for this portrait. The version here, in th
Print of Barley Wood, Hannah More's home for almost thirty years. The print's grey tones depict a wooded countryside with some of Barley Wood's twenty acres. One of two female figures in the mid-ground is pointing towards the house.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Mary Scott
In the dedication she mentions a few new publications that came to her attention too late to be discussed in the poem itself. These include works by Hester Chapone , Hannah More , and Phillis Wheatley
Friends, Associates Anna Seward
AS visited Hannah More and her sisters at Cowslip Green near Bristol, although their literary and religious opinions differed widely.
Seward, Anna. The Poetical Works of Anna Seward. Editor Scott, Sir Walter, J. Ballantyne.
39-40
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
194-5
Textual Production Elizabeth Sewell
Like one of its predecessors, Hannah More 's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a view of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, this work functions...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Sewell
MS follows in the tradition of Hannah More 's Cheap Repository Tracts, and is perhaps also indebted to Mary Leadbeater 's Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry. Maria Edgeworth 's writing for children was also a significant influence.
Friends, Associates Mary Martha Sherwood
MMS judged Anna Seward to be greedy for flattery, especially from the opposite sex. In 1799 she met Hannah More , who was then at the height of her fame and to whom admittance was...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Martha Sherwood
She wrote this story after a bitter winter that had caused the poor much hardship, and within two years of her meeting with Hannah More , then perhaps, at the highest pinnacle of her fame...
Literary responses Lydia Howard Sigourney
Edgar Allan Poe , reviewing this book for the Southern Literary Messenger, thought that LHS did too much borrowing: from Hannah More , William Cowper , William Wordsworth , and Byron . Critic Emily Stipes Watts
Literary responses Elizabeth Smith
Hannah More praised the recently-dead ES in Coelebs in Search of a Wife, setting her in the distinguished company of Elizabeth Carter for acquirements which would have been distinguished in an University, meekly softened...
Textual Features Charlotte Smith
In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia...
Intertextuality and Influence Joanna Southcott
To most readers her torrential prose tracts
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
are long, rambling, obscure, with mis-spellings and grammatical mistakes.
Hopkins, James K. A Woman To Deliver her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution. University of Texas Press.
34
She said she had rejected literary skill as a bribe of the devil. She also (not unlike...
Literary responses Mariana Starke
The Critical Review was unappreciative. It thought that letters were the wrong form for this information and that while MS 's account of her own travels had merit, her catalogues of churches, pictures, amenities, and...
Health Anne Steele
Earlier accounts of AS mention that she was left lame for life by a fall from a horse in her teens (although she must have recovered enough to be capable of walking up Danebury Hill...
Friends, Associates Anne Steele
AS evidently chose her friends at least partly for their literary interests, since they included three publishing women of a younger generation—Hannah More , Anna Seward , and (a closer friend than the first...
Literary Setting Anne Steele
The young Mary Steele found her inspiration for her highflown narrative line in the hill named Danebury, a nearby landmark crowned with Bronze Age fortifications, where AS too often walked (once with Hannah More
Textual Production Anne Steele
AS exchanged occasional poems over the span of her life with other women in her circle of correspondents: primarily her sister Mary Steele, later Wakeford , whom she called Amira, but also her niece...

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