Hannah More: The First Victorian.(Book Review)

Anne Stott. Hannah More: The First Victorian. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xxiii, 384. $30.00. ISBN 0-19-924532-0.

Anne Stott's new biography of Hannah More is a study in the complexities and contradictions in a woman struggling to balance her ambition and faith in times of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political and social turbulence. It argues that More was a "paradoxical figure, who worked for change while supporting existing hierarchies," but whose, "conservatism was thoughtful and subtle, and that she was never a mere mouthpiece ...