Newspapers printed allegations and counter-allegations charging More with plagiarising from Cowley and Cowley with plagiarising from More. As women dramatists they were newsworthy and ripe for satire.
Norton, J. E. “Some Uncollected Authors XVI: Hannah Cowley 1743-1809”. The Book Collector, Vol.
7
, 1958, pp. 68-76.
71
Link, Frederick M., and Hannah Cowley. “Introduction”. The Plays of Hannah Cowley, Vol.
1
, Garland, 1979, p. v - xlxx.
xii
Charles Dibdin
presented the quarrel as...
Literary responses
Catharine Trotter
Nineteenth-century literary historians—Charles Dibdin
, John Doran
, Jane Williams
—tended, though from different viewpoints, to subordinate her writings to her supposed personal characteristics.
Clark, Constance. Three Augustan Women Playwrights. Peter Lang, 1986.
63
More disappointingly, a feminist literary historian of the early...
Literary responses
Hannah More
This tone did not forestall humiliating response. Charles Dibdin
wrote that (though quarrels between male authors were ridiculous enough), women who publicly expose themselves to the world in defence of their literary offspring make the...
Textual Production
Hannah Cowley
HC
soon became a woman of the theatre. She wrote prologues and epilogues for others, and contributed a scene to Charles Dibdin
's pantomime The Touchstone; or, Harlequin Traveller, which opened at Covent Garden