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Reviews a Congenial Figure unconventional deist Mary Wollstonecraft, Reviews a congenial figure. A woman writer who did so little to forward the agenda of contemporary feminism was, apparently, best consigned to silence. But by ignoring Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First More, the scholars of this period Victorian. Oxford University Press, postponed the discovery that her 2003. Pp. 384. £25.00. reputation as a sanctimonious conservative ISBN 0199245320. is not fully deserved. More’s first biographer, William Though an important figure in her own Roberts, whose Memoirs of the Life and time, Hannah More (1745-1833) was Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More ignored by the generation of feminist appeared in the year after her death, bears scholars who began, during the 1970s, to much responsibility for the distorted rediscover forgotten or depreciated picture of More, which, as Stott notes, was women writers. The degree to which these until very recently ‘firmly embedded in scholars overlooked More is revealed by the historiography’ concerning her (p. ix). the fact that no full-length biography Roberts felt free to alter More’s appeared between 1952, when M. G. correspondence to fit his view of the way Jones’s sensible but rather perfunctory that the founding mother of the Hannah More was published, and the Evangelical movement ought to have appearance of Anne Stott’s Hannah More: written. Since few of More’s letters were The First Victorian in 2003. Yet More in print in any other form, Roberts’s was not only the most widely-read British portrait of More became the standard woman writer of her era, the author of picture, but in the early twentieth century plays, conduct books, tracts for the poor, a that picture, which corresponded to its best-selling novel and a variety of creator’s ideal of pious femininity, devotional works, but also a historical appeared less flattering. When, in the figure with connections to the 1990s, several feminist scholars, noticing bluestocking circle, to David Garrick and their predecessors’ oversight, began to pay Samuel Johnson, to Horace Walpole, to serious attention to More, the results were the abolitionist movement and to the first mixed. A number of these scholars, and second generations of the Clapham relying on a narrow range of sources and sect, most notably William Wilberforce, often using Roberts’s work uncritically, Henry Thornton and Thomas Babington show an ‘almost personal dislike of More’ Macaulay. as they dress up the old charges of What explains the fact that feminists of excessive religiosity and hypocritical the 1970s and 80s paid so little attention conservatism in the languages of cultural to More? More had a reputation as a studies and psychoanalysis (p. x). Others, political conservative; as a self-styled such as Mitzi Myers and Patricia Demers, Evangelical saint; as a repressive educator present a more balanced and sympathetic and philanthropist who offered instruction picture. and help to the poor on condition that they None of these commentators, however, accept their place in a supposedly God- has come close to presenting a portrait of given social order; and finally as a woman More that is as subtle, complex, who won public glory by counselling convincing and solidly grounded in other women to live modestly within the extensive research as the one delineated private sphere. This reputation did not by Anne Stott’s superb biography. Stott attract the scholars who found More’s spent nine years researching this book, contemporary, the fearless, and her hard work has certainly paid dividends. She consulted over a dozen British society and politics as seen collections of More’s unpublished papers through the lens of one extraordinary and correspondence, most of which were woman’s activities. ignored by earlier researchers. These Jane Nardin lively letters, which often escaped University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee bowdlerisation and from which Stott quotes judiciously, give a good sense of More’s humorous side. Stott uses the Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler correspondence to prove that More often (eds), Unfolding the South: Nineteenth- engaged in a ‘balancing act’ whereby she Century British Women Writers and presented her views as less progressive, Artists in Italy. Manchester University both politically and socially, than they Press, 2003. Pp. 246. really were, in order to retain her influence Hb: £47.50, ISBN 0719061296. with the conservative upper classes whose Pb: £15.99, ISBN 071906139X. beliefs, manners and conduct she hoped to influence (p. 160). Stott also does an Lively and detailed, meticulous and excellent job of showing the positive stimulating, these essays reconsider aspects of More’s much-criticised British involvements in Risorgimento philanthropic projects. Italy by focussing on women – writers, In addition to mastering More’s painters, historians and travellers. unpublished papers, Stott has studied, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning is famous in exemplary thoroughness, the huge body of this area and she is at the centre of several historical material that is relevant to of the essays: Richard Cronin considers understanding More’s wide-ranging Casa Guidi Windows as an attempt to activities. In elegant, economical and discover the stance of the true citizen, ‘at nicely paced prose, she presents the once separate from the state and joined to information one needs in order to it’ (p. 50); Isobel Armstrong addresses the comprehend More’s aims, choices and the same quality in the poem – its highlighting constraints under which she laboured. of a viewer distanced from events – and Stott knows that the context in which finds in it Barrett Browning’s recognition More acted is ‘hard to recover at this that ‘a mediated world is inevitable’ and distance of time’, but, unlike some other that ‘the multiplicity of symbol forces commentators, she invariably makes the choice upon the subject’ (p. 68). These effort to locate More in her own era, essays form an arresting pair, synergistic instead of judging her harshly by the by virtue of their closeness and standards of the present (p. 256). Indeed, divergence. Alison Chapman’s reading of Stott suggests that our world may not be Barrett Browning’s later Poems Before much more humane or enlightened than Congress develops these concerns by the one More inhabited, though we like to observing that the poems are ‘both think it is. Thus, discussing the fate of the prophetic and performative’ (p. 88). Their insurance societies for poor women, which lack of widespread critical acceptance More founded and funded, Stott dryly arises perhaps from their attempt to enact notes that they ‘continued to exist until the revolution as well as to inspire it, their twentieth century, when the creation of the wish to be immediate amidst the mediated. welfare state seemed to make them Though no one else receives such superfluous’ (pp. 118-19, my italics). concerted attention from the volume, the This biography not only does a collection has extraordinary breadth magnificent job of illuminating its subject, coupled with unusual detail. Jan Marsh it also offers a fascinating picture of late- and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, who have eighteenth and early-nineteenth century collaboratively done so much to revive interest in female Victorian painters, allegorised she says ‘as a marriage contribute two separate essays: Marsh on between la bella Italia and the King of Marie Sparlati Stillman, connected to the Savoy, Vittorio Emanuel II’ (p. 91). Her Rossetti circle, and Nunn on, among account of Cobbe’s withdrawal from ‘the others, Jane Benham Hay. Marsh evokes pulsating, busy world’ of modern Italy in vivid detail the Florentine milieu of ‘towards a far quieter, meditative one’ Sparlati Stillman, where the artist lived for sympathetically perceives its implication many years, plus her all-too feminine that ‘for striving women, as for striving reticence and submissiveness to an nations, regeneration is no easy matter’ oppressive husband. Italy provided the (pp. 107, 109). Her study offers a possible perfect environment for her to develop her explanatory context for Spartali Stillman’s own ‘delicate aesthetic offering quiet paintings too, indicating the many subtle harmonies in soft pinks and greens’ (p. interconnections that this collection 177). Benham Hay’s Italy was more of a suggests. battleground. Like Barrett Browning, she Another is dreams: repeatedly these addressed the relation between England critics discover Victorian women and Italy – between world-power and dreaming of la bella Italia, and seeing her backward, inchoate nation. Her paintings female form rise up before them, as if present the visible landscape of Italy with from the dead. Alison Chapman’s account an unusual degree of realism and question of Barrett Browning’s spiritualist the English viewer’s expectations of enthusiasm finds many parallels in Angela romance – expectations Spartali Stillman Leighton’s compelling discussion of embraced. Hay’s pair of paintings, writings from later in the century in which England and Italy and A Boy in Florentine Italy or the Renaissance rise up from the Costume of the 15th Century, exhibited in dead. Catherine Maxwell’s informative 1859, approach this task of disruption and and illuminating essay on Vernon Lee challenge from opposite directions. Nunn follows a similar path. In their contextualises the paintings wonderfully introduction Stabler and Chapman argue well, in relation to the artistic traditions that Madame de Stäel’s Corinne, or Italy they draw upon and the moment of their provided an enduring image not only of production. The female painter seems to Italy but of the female artist as well. Later have made herself politically astute and nineteenth-century women writers were engaged, even powerful in these paintings, ‘haunted by their fictive precursor, despite the ingrained Victorian prejudice Corinne’ (p. 1). That haunting, it emerges, against her being so. took a perhaps surprisingly direct form in Esther Schor likewise draws attention to these dream-visions; psychologically, too, hitherto little-known figures.
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