The World of Hannah More (review)

“Hannah More is today a forgotten writer and an unknown personality,” wrote Mary Alden Hopkins in her 1947 biography of one of the most influential writers and personalities in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England (1). Fifty years later, Hannah More’s reputation has hardly improved. If she is remembered at all, it is likely to be as the “thoroughly reactionary” opponent of her contemporary, the radical political activist and feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft (Tomalin 303–4). More’s latest biographer, Patrica Demers, agrees that history has not been kind to Hannah More. Admitting that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to give More “a place in the sun,” where surely she would be “scorched . . . by the ultraviolet index of some criticism,” Demers suggests that More might be allowed “to lounge in a slightly more benign shade” (Preface). Demers states that her study of More is not “a rescue mission, but rather an attempt to take Hannah More seriously.” Demers does not idealize More—“I wish to examine her as a complex human phenomenon—warts and all,” she states in her preface. Yet Demers’s sensitive and careful treatment of her subject reveals more than a scholar’s attempt to present a balanced account. The author’s respect and affection for the formidable Hannah More is evident in her introductory chapter, which begins with a sensitive and reflective description of her own visit to Barley Wood (near Bristol), the home Hannah More built and occupied for more than twenty-five years.

Demers’s interest in presenting a fairer, better balanced picture of More than has been reflected in recent studies has resulted in a book that is short on contemporary anecdote but long on scholarship. Unlike many earlier familiar and uncritical biographies like those by Marian Harland (1900), Annette B. Meakin (1911), and Mary Alden Hopkins (1947), which were based on Victorian biographies and letters edited after More’s death, The World of Hannah More contains few colorful digressions on eighteenth-century life. Demers does not dwell on More’s association with the bas bleu ladies, the customs, manners, and fashions of the eighteenth century, or the receptions and dinner parties More attended when she was befriended by Samuel Johnson and David Garrick and admired by London society. This has all been said. The World of Hannah More is a concise book that will be most appreciated by readers with an interest in literary analysis and a prior understanding of the subject and the period.

Demers works hard to present a balanced account of More’s life and work by examining her entire career, not simply selected aspects. She is careful to situate her subject in her time and place, considering More’s major texts in relation to the works of her contemporaries, the events in her life, and her effect on readers of the day. Demers thus dismantles many of the stereotypes that have encumbered our understanding More and avoids many of the pitfalls of presentism characteristic of similar studies. Demers notes a number of examples of selective reading that have produced interesting yet problematic interpretations of More’s life and works, one of the more recent being Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s presentation of More as a “daddy’s girl.” Kowaleski-Wallace, whose interest is to explore patterns of patriarchal complicity (ix), admits to a selective reading of aspects of More’s biography and career in order to “understand why patriarchy has been such an efficacious force in women’s lives” (ix). Kowaleski-Wallace’s determination to follow her theory leads her to offer some interesting ideas about More’s relationships with her parents, sisters, her one-time suitor, and a series of remarkable older men—David Garrick, Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, and a “whole bevy of bishops.” Yet, as Demers points out, such a narrow focus ignores the more substantial evidence of More’s close and enduring friendships with both men and women over her entire lifetime. Moreover, psychoanalytical interpretations of some of More’s works may be compelling...