Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Her subjects in the first essay are Hannah More
(especially her Practical Piety and An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul) and Anna Letitia Barbauld
, whom she regarded as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Helena Wells
The body of her work takes up her favourite topic: the difficulties of women as wage-earners—difficulties which impede the progress of my own sex to independence—and what should be done to solve them...
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Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
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Henrietta Maria Bowdler
In this work HMB
warns against improper choice of friends and the excesses of romantic friendship, even while she idealises true friendship. She praises the well-employed talents of Elizabeth Montagu
, Elizabeth Smith
, Hannah More
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Martha Hale
She writes on public themes with equal panache, attacking colonial appropriations and in another poem calling Warren Hastings
an oppressed hero. She addresses public men and women, and here too is attentive to women's issues...
SF
's letters deal mainly with day-to-day occurrences, but her literary opinons are always worth having. She comments on several works by Lady Charlotte Campbell (later Bury)
. Reading Austen
's Emma in 1816 (the...
This diary, covering thirteen years of her later teens and her twenties, provides an annual list of people she spent her time with, public places she visited, and private entertainments she enjoyed. Its criticism, mostly...
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Anna Margaretta Larpent
This later diary, generally written daily at any odd moment, provides indexing of special events which reveals AML
's methodical character. Occasional months are missing here and there. The diarist offers penetrating comment on a...
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George Eliot
On 11 February 1848 GE
discusses in a letter to John Sibree
her views on Hannah More
(once admired, now detested as exemplifying the bluestocking woman on display as a kind of freak), Benjamin Disraeli
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Mary Ann Browne
Her title poem is rich and dignified, written in Spenser
ian stanzas. The later Ocean is a poem in similar style. Many other pieces are social and sentimental, with titles like Tears, Loves...
The poems give little evidence that MAB
at the end of her life shared the sentiments of her editor. In the earlier selection, The Gifted proclaims woe to people of exceptional talent—but its anonymous warning...
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Ann Yearsley
By opening her debut volume with an invocation of the tragic muse, Melpomene, AY
suggests a very different concept of her poetic gift from the one which soon became publicly current.
Waldron, Mary. “’This Muse-born Wonder’: The Occluded Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and Poet of Clifton”. Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, Macmillan, pp. 113-26.