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HUMANITIES 223 Patricia Demers. The World ofHannah More University Press of Kentucky. xii, 178. us $32.95 Patricia Demers's literary biography of Harmah More offers an excellent overview of More's career and life. More has no doubt become a relatively familiar figure, givenrecentfeminist work in the area ofeighteenth-century literary studies, but a figure familiar primarily as an example of the period's anti-feminist, anti-egalitarian values. Demers does not apo1ogize for More's views, which are by many standards objectionable, but argues forcefully for assessing the significance of her work in terms of such things as the spirirual movements, debates about women's roles, and attitudes towards charity ofher time. Demers asserts that this historicized approach 'does not diminish [More's] individuality, but it makes her less of an oddity.' While she acknowledges that More's 'ideology of the female station and influence,' her ideas about charity, and her meliorist role as a 'moral imperialist' are out of step with current scholarship that privileges 'the multitude' More was trying to reform, she gives More her due, and creates a compelling picture of a woman ofstrong spiritual and moral convictions, one who participated in the public debates of her time and who considered with intense seriousness her place in this world and her vision of the next. While I occasionally wished for even more elaboration of the social context of the time - mention of the debates surrounding the Poor Laws, for instance, would have strengthened Demers's portrait of More as 'less of an oddity' - the book succeeds in offering a well-contextualized view of a figure distanced from us, as Demers notes, temporally and ideologically. Chapters deal with More's work chronologically and generically, starting with her early drama; moving through her more familiar work, the Cheap Repository Tracts, Coelebs in Search ofa Wife, and Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education; and concluding with the 'Unread Hannah More,' Practical Piety, Christian Morals, Essay on Saint Paul, and The Spirit ofPrayer. Demers demonstrates an admirable depth ofscholarship as she makes available important unpublished material. This is particularly true ofDemers's frequent quotations from More'scorrespondence. Demers also does a commendable job of comparing More with other female writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Ann Yearsley, Frances Burney, Catherine Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft. She makes the important point, for instance, that More resembles other writers more readily labelled as 'feminist' (Astell, Chudleigh, orWollstonecraft ) in her strong opinions about the value of education. As interesting as the information here about More is the account the book provides of the difficulty of writing a literary biography for a writer who has no 'sanguinal, ideological, or literary' successors. As critics have done for other literary figures, Demers seeks not to present a definitive 224 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 view of More, but rather to flesh out the problems she presents to twentieth -century readers. She thus portrays More as a I complex and conflicted' writer, a woman of 'doubleness and contradictions' (Margaret Anne Doody's biography of Frances Burney seems to be a model for this approach). In acknowledging the difficulty of dealing with a figure like More, Demers asks frequent questions about More's currency: 'Can we simply content ourselves with charting the differences between More's enthusiastic spiritualizing of the social affections, without hesitancy, equivocation, orproblematizing nuance, and our own suspicion of regnant models, certitude, and domination, our sense that there is no longer any grand story, only local stories?' While I appreciate that Demers's use of questions is a stylistic element of her 'fair' treatment of More, on occasion I thought that this weakened the importance of the revisionist treatment. This book in many ways is as much about the interrelationship between academe, history, gender, and literature as it is about More. That More is both politically incorrect, in Demers's terms, and significant to her time raises serious issues for critics who must deal with questions of literary value and, at some level, canonicity. Demers does an excellentjob ofraising these problems to the level of conscious engagement. . Themost significantdrawback of DemersIS book is the index, which lists names but not...

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