Hannah More

Hannah More (born at Fishponds, near Bristol, in 1745; died at Clifton in 1833) was an English writer, dramatist and philanthropist who moved between London's literary world and the education of the poor. Her life spanned the late Enlightenment and the years of the French Revolution, and she matters because she combined the conversation of the fashionable salon with a strong moral and religious purpose.

The daughter of a schoolmaster, she taught at the school her family ran in Bristol and wrote her first plays, intended for young women to perform. After an engagement fell through in 1773, she moved to London, where she came to know Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick. Garrick wrote the prologue to her tragedy Percy, which succeeded at Covent Garden in 1777. She later withdrew from the stage and from Elizabeth Montagu's circle, and her writing turned towards evangelical themes: sacred dramas, prose essays on the conduct of the wealthy and, in the years of revolution, cheap tracts meant to reach ordinary readers as a reply to Thomas Paine. She became close to Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, which opposed the Atlantic slave trade. From the 1790s, with her sister Martha, she set up schools in Somerset where children were taught to read but not to write, a policy that drew suspicion from farmers and clergy alike.

Her quick, informal prose won her wide readership, though it also drew criticism. She has been described as politically conservative, hostile to revolution and, depending on the reader, as either an anti-feminist or a conservative feminist. Her legacy lies mainly in moral writing and in popular education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.