The topic was eloquence, something Christians had been conflicted about since the first-century church when Paul wrote that in bringing the gospel, he did not come with “eloquence.” A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value o...
It is so easy to practice a creditable degree of so seeming virtue, and so difficult to purity and direct the affections of the heart, that I feel myself in continual danger of appearing better than I am; and I verily believe it is possible to make o...
…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning...
Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts—eig...
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.
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
…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 t...
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
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 dress, and dance; it is a being who can comfort and counsel him; one who can reason a...
What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.
