Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hannah More and David Garrick: Patronage and Friendship
- 2 A Middling-Class Poet-Maker: Hannah More and Ann Yearsley
- 3 Patronage, Gratitude and Friendship, 1785–90
- 4 ‘Such is Bristol's Soul’: Patronage and Rivalry
- 5 Novel Writing and the French Revolution
- 6 Romantic Bristol: Creative Networks in the 1790s
- 7 Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hannah More and David Garrick: Patronage and Friendship
- 2 A Middling-Class Poet-Maker: Hannah More and Ann Yearsley
- 3 Patronage, Gratitude and Friendship, 1785–90
- 4 ‘Such is Bristol's Soul’: Patronage and Rivalry
- 5 Novel Writing and the French Revolution
- 6 Romantic Bristol: Creative Networks in the 1790s
- 7 Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Ann Yearsley and Hannah More have often been divisive figures in eighteenth century literary history, when they have featured in it at all. Of the two, Hannah More's name has better endured what Stuart Curran termed the ‘caprices of historians with history’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which saw the contributions of many women erased from the record. More's endurance was in part because of her youthful associations with some of the most famous figures of the eighteenth century, including David Garrick, Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu, and in part because of the sheer weight of influence built up during a literary career which spanned nearly half a century. But that longevity has also proved problematic; the excitement of the heady early years in London when More first emerged as a dramatic writer has sometimes been obscured by her later reputation as a strident opponent of the French Revolution who used her knowledge of the labouring rural poor to help put an end to lower-class hopes for a more egalitarian society. In addition, her moral treatises and evangelical texts set high standards for her readers. The response of one, the heir presumptive Princess Charlotte and the subject of More's 1805 educational text Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, was that she was ‘not quite good enough for that’. More's advice was not easy to follow.
But More's reputation has also suffered in the last thirty years with the rise of feminist and Marxist criticism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and PoetryThe Story of a Literary Relationship, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014