Hannah More

Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies (Dodo Press) Hannah More

Hannah More (1745-1833) was an English religious writer and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a clever verse-writer and witty talker in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects on the Puritanic side, and as a practical philanthropist. Her first literary efforts were pastoral plays, suitable for young ladies to act, the first being written in 1762 under the title of The Search After Happiness. She published Sacred Dramas in 1782. These and the poems Bas-Bleu and Florio (1786) mark her gradual transition to more serious views of life, which were fully expressed in prose, in her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790). She was a rapid writer, and her work is consequently discursive, animated and formless. Amongst her other works are Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies (1777) and Stories for the Young; or, Cheap Repository Tracts.