Juliet Barker
A Call to Alms
Hannah More: The First Victorian
By Anne Stott
Oxford University Press 365pp £25 order from our bookshop
ALTHOUGH A CELEBRITY in her own day Hannah More was fated to become a footnote in the biographies of her contemporaries. Today, if she is remembered at all, it is as ‘Holy Hannah’, the elderly spinster who was the author of books of conduct for girls and a member of the Clapham Sect of Evangelicals. Even when she died in 1833, at the great age of eighty-eight, her reputation was already in decline; one obituary breezily declared that she ‘had become. I as an author, posthumous to the present age, long before she quitted life’. A year later, the obligatory worthy biography was published in four tediously dull didactic volumes, and by this time-honoured means of commemorating the great and the good, More was effectively consigned to oblivion.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad