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.
During her time at Bristol, she met the elderly Hannah More
, who encouraged her in her teaching project. Her interest in factory reform later brought her into contact with Lord Shaftesbury
.
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.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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
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.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge.
under West
Balfour, Clara. A Sketch of Mrs. Trimmer. W. and F. G. Cash.
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...
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.
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...
Instructor
Mary Robinson
At a tender age she attended, as a boarder, the school run by Hannah More
and her sisters. Several of her schoolfellows (among them Alicia Tyndal Palmer
) were daughters of theatre people. The girls...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Mary Wollstonecraft
, though she saw many virtues in this book, was not happy that Adelaide was educated to be obedient, not independent-minded: that with all her accomplishments she was ready to marry any body...
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...
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.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Brooke
This novel became notorious for its hostile portrait of Garrick
. It also complains of the lack of outlets for new plays, attacks Town and Country Magazine for its Tete-a-Tete feature of gossip or scandal...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
Influences on AR
's writings include the opera, contemporary travel writers, and Joseph Priestley
's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
67
AR
probably helped to produce the fashion for literary quotation...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The authorial voice is forthright about the poet's own desire to be a literary trail-blazer for womankind, and she is already defining that task in terms of rejection of the domestic. She also has a...
