SOURCE: Myers, Mitzi. “Hannah More's Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology.” In Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, pp. 264-84. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Myers analyzes the feminist implications of More's Cheap Repository tracts, stating that “didactic women like More shaped a new ideal of educated and responsible womanhood.”

Remarking “the extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women,” Virginia Woolf urged the importance of a change, “which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.” An eyewitness to that late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century female literary efflorescence, the poet Samuel Rogers offers another perspective on the phenomenon: “How strange it is that while we men...