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.
Samuel Johnson
pronounced in conversation that CL
was worthy to rank with the exceptional women Carter
, More
, and Burney
: more yet, she was superiour to them all.
Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Editors Hill, George Birkbeck and Laurence Fitzroy Powell, Clarendon.
4: 275
Family and Intimate relationships
Catharine Macaulay
At twenty-one, he was much younger than she was (though many exaggerated the age difference), and of a lower rank (a saddler's son, and at the time of their marriage a surgeon's mate). He was...
Literary responses
Catharine Macaulay
Her biographer Bridget Hill
identifies CM
's fame as having lasted fifteen years: from the publication of her first volume to the date of her second marriage (1763-78). But in fact she continued to command...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Maria Mackenzie
Meanwhile the heroine, Maria Stanley, is unjustly spurned by her husband because he believes the lying insinuations of a jealous and wicked woman whom he has rejected, but the truth is revealed in time for...
Textual Production
Jane Marcet
Out of an evident anxiety about unrest on the part of the working classes in the years that led up to the Reform Bill, JM
issued John Hopkins's Notions on Political Economy, published as...
Textual Production
Emma Marshall
An idea for a fiction about Hannah More
's time at Cheddar
Marshall, Beatrice. Emma Marshall. Seeley.
206
gave rise (after EM
's publisher had advised leaving More out of it) to Under the Mendips, A Tale, which...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Harriet Martineau
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...
Education
Mary Russell Mitford
She studied English, French, Italian, history, geography, Latin, and music (the subject at which she was least talented), and she acted in a production of Hannah More
's Search after Happiness.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 189-92
She...
Leisure and Society
Mary Russell Mitford
Like other old people living alone (such as Hannah More
) she was imposed on by servants: she reluctantly dismissed several individuals, including a maid named Kerrenhappuck who had lied to her about having an...
Textual Features
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter
(the most intellectually...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
EM
supported her friend Hannah More
in organizing subscriptions for Ann Yearsley
's Poems, on Several Occasions.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
261
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
Hannah More
's biographer M. G. Jones
dated the heyday of the Bluestocking salons as 1770-85, but EM
had been holding salons for twenty years before this.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press.
Working on the model of the Christian tract series for the poor, dating back to Hannah More
's Cheap Repository Tracts, CM
aimed these stories at members of the Jewish working class. The first...
Textual Production
Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...