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.
She does not eschew politics on account of her readers' youth, but delivers an anti-war and anti-imperial message: The finest sight that could possibly be exhibited to me on earth, would be not a great...
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...
Textual Features
Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe
's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy
, the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
draws on Hannah More
, her niece Lucy Aikin
, and (anonymously) Joanna Baillie
. She is even-handed in that she includes six excerpts from James Fordyce
's Sermons to Young Women, a...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Textual Features
Priscilla Wakefield
PW
welcomes the way that Adam Smith
and other Scottish Enlightenment writers have made womanhood a branch of philosophy, not a little interesting.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
106
Unlike Wollstonecraft
, she sees women's sphere as naturally limited and...
Hannah More
was a near neighbour; though it is not known that they made contact. Langford Court was later occupied by More's good friends the Addington family.
Reception
Jane Taylor
Like her sister
many years later, she replied robustly to complaint about her overtly Dissenting code of conduct. She reveals a clear sense of the disparity between standards applied to hegemonic beliefs and those applied...
Reception
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Reviews of this volume were somewhat lukewarm.
Tomlins, Elizabeth Sophia. “Introduction”. The Victim of Fancy, edited by Daniel Cook, Pickering and Chatto, p. xi - xxxi.
xi
Hannah More
briefly summarizes the story of Quashi in a note to her Slavery: A Poem, 1788 (without mentioning his love for the white Matilda). James G. Basker
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...
Reception
Marion Reid
Scholar Margaret McFadden
notes that this work was tremendously successful, particularly in the United States, where it went through five editions between 1847 and 1852. The 1847 edition and all ensuing versions were printed...
Publishing
Lucy Walford
LW
's lives of Jane Taylor
, Elizabeth Fry
, Hannah More
, and Mary Somerville
, each originally printed in Blackwood's Magazine, appeared together as Four Biographies from Blackwood in Edinburgh and London.