“Genius will educate itself.” 253opening sentence of Strictures—“one of the most feminist she ever wrote,”
in which More complained that it was “a singular injustice” to give women
a defective education and then expect from them “the most undeviating
purity of conduct”— linked More to Mary Astell, one of the foremothers
of feminism, writing a hundred years earlier. The observation had become
a standard feminist trope of the eighteenth century (Stott 2003, 221; Mel-
lor 2000).
Hannah More argued for obedience, contentment, and chastity while
mounting an ambitious program of reform that threatened at least two
of these demands. Her outreach was formidable. The Cheap Repository
Tracts (1795 –1798), which were designed to counter the “poison” of Tom
Paine, were read by an estimated two million readers — a quarter of the
population. Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, in comparison, sold per-
haps 3,000 English copies in its fi rst fi ve years: a respectable but not a
startling number.
To refl ect upon Hannah More’s career as a writer and reform-minded
social thinker in relation to that of Mary Wollstonecraft is useful in another
sense. Both women were characteristic of their times in their experimental
use of genres. Neither can be easily categorized as writers; both took seri-
ously the capacity of fi ction to convey truths about the social and political
order and to change minds by affecting feelings. More began as a dramatist,
and later wrote a novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809); Wollstonecraft
had early success as a novelist with Mary, a Fiction (1788) and later gave
expression to some of the ideas of the Rights of Woman in Maria, or the
Wrongs of Woman (1798), a novel whose title was designed to draw atten-
tion to its connection with the earlier polemical work. Choosing to name
her heroines after herself, Wollstonecraft also signaled that these fi ctions
were to be understood as having autobiographical signifi cance. The real-
life Mary, whose pronouncements could be read in the Rights of Woman
as well as in the Analytical Review and elsewhere, lent credence to her
fi ctional selves.
Readers in the 1780s and 1790s were conditioned to think about the
author while reading female-authored fi ction for a number of reasons. De-
velopments in the periodical and newspaper industry were accelerating
interest in “celebrities.” There was already a demand for stories about ac-
tresses and courtesans; when an actress-courtesan turned author, as Mary
Robinson did, the press paid attention, especially because Robinson had
been the mistress of the Prince of Wales; his fi nancial settlement on her
when they parted was printed in the newspapers. Robinson’s own partici-
pation in newspaper culture, as Harriet Guest explains, was signifi cant in