page_title: Hannah More
section_title: Playwright
hierarchical_section_title: Hannah More / Playwright
caption_attribution_description: English: Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo - left to right, Catharine Macaulay (seated), Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson, seated), Elizabeth Griffith (seated), Hannah More (standing), Charlotte Lennox (née Ramsay, standing)
context_page_description: Hannah More was an English religious writer and philanthropist, remembered as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical philanthropist. Born in Bristol, she taught at a school established there by her father and began writing plays. She became involved with the London literary elite, and rose to be a leading Bluestocking member. Later her plays and poetry became more evangelical and she joined a group campaigning against the slave trade. In the 1790s she wrote several Cheap Repository Tracts on moral, religious and political topics, for distribution to the literate poor. Meanwhile, she increased her philanthropic work in the Mendip area, encouraged by William Wilberforce.
context_section_description: More's first literary efforts were pastoral plays, written while she was still teaching and suitable for young ladies to act. The first was The Search after Happiness, written in 1762. By the mid-1780s over 10,000 copies of this had been sold. Among her literary models was Metastasio whose opera 'Attilio Regulo she used as a basis for a drama, The Inflexible Captive.
  In London, More sought to associate herself with the literary elite, including Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke. Johnson is quoted as saying to her, "Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth having." He would later be quoted as calling her "the finest versifatrix in the English language". Meanwhile she became a prominent member of the Bluestocking group of women engaged in polite conversation and literary and intellectual pursuits. She attended the salon of Elizabeth Montagu, where she became acquainted with Frances Boscawen, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Vesey and Hester Chapone, some of whom would become lifelong friends. In 1782 she wrote a witty verse celebration of her friends and the circle to which they belonged, The Bas Bleu, or, Conversation, published in 1784.
  Garrick wrote a prologue and epilogue for Hannah More's tragedy Percy, which was shown successfully at Covent Garden in December 1777, and revived in 1785 with Sarah Siddons at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. A copy of Percy was found amongst Mozart's possessions in 1791. Another drama, The Fatal Falsehood, produced in 1779 after Garrick's death, was less successful, and she never wrote for the stage again. However, a tragedy entitled "The Inflexible Captive" was published in 1818. In 1781 she first met Horace Walpole and corresponded with him from that time onwards. At Bristol she discovered the poet Ann Yearsley, and when Yearsley became destitute, she raised a considerable sum of money for her benefit. Lactilia, as Yearsley was known, published Poems, on Several Occasions in 1785, earning about £600. More and Montagu held the profits in trust to protect them from Yearsley's husband. However, Ann Yearsley wished to receive the capital and made insinuations of stealing against More, forcing her to release the money. These literary and social failures lay behind More's withdrawal from London intellectual circles.
caption: More (standing, left, as a personification of Melpomene, muse of tragedy), in the company of other "bluestockings" (1778).
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