Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Hannah More
-
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.
The introduction presents an old gentleman whose impatience with religious novels is being patiently reasoned away by his grandson with a reminder that the category includes Bunyan
. An elderly bachelor, a reviewer, a boarding-school...
Publishing
Hannah Cowley
The St James's Chronicle printed HC
's letter defending herself from the charge of plagiarism, and claiming that her Albina had been pillaged, before its staging, in both Percy and Fatal Falsehood by Hannah More
Publishing
Hannah Cowley
It was badly presented, by two of the cast in particular.
Escott, Angela. Email about supposed quarrel between Hannah Cowley and Hannah More to Isobel Grundy.
It had been completed by 1777, but rejected by Thomas Harris
of Covent Garden
, who then produced Hannah More
's Percy instead. Tragedy...
Textual Production
Dinah Mulock Craik
The Religious Tract Society
published Dinah Mulock
's first book, Michael the Miner, after the tradition of Hannah More
's Cheap Repository Tracts.
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne.
80
Textual Production
Ann Batten Cristall
The publisher Joseph Johnson
issued by subscription ABC
's Poetical Sketches: an important text in women's Romanticism.
The Critical Review discerned in the collection considerable merit and the hand of genius: so much so that it felt it safe to overlook a few blemishes (though it mentioned some for the sake...
Family and Intimate relationships
May Crommelin
MC
's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth (Mullins) Crommelin
, had been educated in Bath, at the school run by Hannah More
's sisters.
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.
Cultural formation
Hannah Cullwick
To all eyes she lived as Munby's servant; she often still slept in the basement kitchen. In the evenings, however, she played the role of a lady wife, sitting with Munby in the parlour, conversing...
Reception
Mary Whateley Darwall
In April 1774 (ten years on from her first volume but long before her second) the Monthly Review (in a notice of Hannah More
's The Inflexible Captive) listed MWD
as one of the...
Anthologization
Mary Deverell
Parts of MD
's Miscellanies were reprinted at Burlington, New Jersey (with essays by Hannah More
), as The Ladies' Literary Companion, for an American female audience.
Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834. Routledge.
129
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
Friends, Associates
Mary Deverell
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes both that MD
received patronage from Bristol heiress Ann Lovell Gwatkin
, and that Hannah More
emphatically did not take to her, though their paths must repeatedly have...
Literary responses
Mary Deverell
Among those who felt the sermon genre was inappropriate to a woman was apparently Hannah More
, whose use of the word parsoness for Deverell (quoted by Anne Stott
in the Oxford Dictionary of National...
Publishing
Mary Deverell
MD
had apparently finished this poem in draft by 1782.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Hannah More
, who heard MD
read from her poem in 1782, experienced the performance as burlesque. She claimed to have listened through 1,800 lines and took exception to Deverell's claims both to the genre...
Education
George Eliot
Her devotion to John Bunyan
's Pilgrim's Progress remained unchanged during this period. She also read heavyweight works of theology, Hannah More
's letters, and a life of William Wilberforce
. By late 1838, however...