It is so easy to practice a creditable degree of so seeming virtue, and so difficult to purify and direct the affections of the heart, that I feel myself in continual danger of appearing better...

I am so afraid that strangers with think me good! and there is a degree of hypocrisy in appearing much better than one is.” – Hannah More

eloquence.” A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value of eloquence, associating it with his pagan background and training in Greek rhetoric while simultaneously employing it winsomely in his Christian writings. Such suspicion...

In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of...

masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his ‘utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig...

Rather than majoring in frivolities, women should be educated in useful subjects and ‘be furnished with a stock of ideas, and principles, and qualifications, and habits, ready to be applied and appropriated…’ – Hannah More

Her shift in thinking was clearly conflicted. It must have been difficult to disavow something for which she had a deep love and in which she had been immersed so much of her life.

…the traditional family structure that More supported in her writings enabled women to ‘be intelligent, rational, virtuous, and noble creatures, capable of great intellectual and moral achievements. They had the potential for immense influence on...

What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.

When a man of sense comes to marry, it is a companion whom he wants, and not an artist. It is not merely a creature who can paint, and play, and sing, and draw, and...