The above lines determine Hannah More's attitude towards female learning, which she regarded as the devil's own bait. As an example of the corrupting tendencies of foreign literature she makes a few remarks on the much-admired German plays of "The Robbers" and "The Stranger", the second of which presents the character of an adulteress in the most pleasing and fascinating colours. "To make matters worse, the German example has found a follower in a woman, a professed admirer and imitator of the German suicide Werter. The female Werter, as she is styled by her biographer, asserts in a work entitled, "The Wrongs of Women" that adultery is justifiable, and that the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England, constitute one of the wrongs of women".[35]
To come to a correct understanding of this passage, it is necessary to remember that the "Strictures" were written in 1799, when the remembrance of Mary Wollstonecraft's attempt at suicide was still fresh, and when her unexpected death had drawn attention to Godwin's edition of her works, the only one containing "Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman".
In their ideas of marriage, as indeed in all their applications of religious precepts, the gulf between Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft becomes immeasurably wide. But wherever the sense of moral duty, unhampered by convention or by a rigid philosophical harness, was free to assert itself, it is curious to note the close affinity between the ideas of two women who occupied such widely different positions in the social life of their time, yet were both so extremely conscious of the moral responsibility of their sex. It remains for us to consider the interesting—if somewhat eccentric—personality of the woman who had brought down upon herself so many charges of gross immorality.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, p. 10.
[28] Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, p. 245.
[29] See W. Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, p. 62.
[30] Walpole.
[31] There seems to have been a good deal of uncertainty as to the authorship of the works of the famous brother and sister. Contemporary opinion unanimously assigns that of "Le Grand Cyrus" to Madeleine de Scudéry, and not to her brother George.
[32] Like Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More took brevet-rank as a matron by virtue of her literary publications.