More, Hannah

More, Hannah, was the fourth daughter of the village schoolmaster of Stapleton, near Bristol, where she was born in 1745. As a child she showed great quickness of apprehension and a good memory. Her sisters were sent to a school in Bristol, and when the eldest was twenty-one they opened a boarding-school there, to which Hannah went when she was twelve years old. She wrote verses at an early age, and in 1762 she published The Search after Happiness, a pastoral drama. In 1774 she went on a visit to London, and was introduced to the Garricks, and by them to Dr Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the best literary society of London. During this period of her life she wrote two tales in verse, and two tragedies, Percy and The Fatal Secret, both of which were acted. While in London she went a great deal into society, but gradually found this mode of life to be unsatis- factory, and was led by her religious views to withdraw from it. After the publication of her Sacred Dramas, she retired to Cowslip Green, a cottage near Bristol, where she did much to improve the condition of the poor in her neighbourhood by establishing schools for their instruction. She still continued her literary work, and helped by her writings to raise the tone of English society. Her essays on The Manners of the Great and The Religion of the Fashionable World (a pamphlet on Village Politics), her novel Celebs in Search of a Wife, and a tract called The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain are some of the most popular of her works. In 1828 she moved from Barley Wood, a house she had built for herself near Cowslip Green, and took up her abode at Clifton, where she died, September 7, 1833. See the Life by Roberts (2 vols. 1838), and the short Life by Miss Yonge (1888).