In this, Hannah More’s only novel and an early nineteenth-century best-seller, More gives voice to a wealthy twenty-three-year-old bachelor, who styles himself “Coelebs” (unmarried), but seeks a wife. After the death of his father, Coelebs journeys from the north of England to London, where he encounters a fashionable array of eager mothers and daughters before he visits the Hampshire home of his father’s friend, Mr. Stanley. Lucilla Stanley, Mr. Stanley’s daughter, is both an intellectual and a domestic woman, and Coelebs’ ideal partner. In this intelligent novel about the meeting of two minds, More shows the ways in which a couple becomes truly “matched” as opposed to merely “joined.”
Along with a critical introduction, this Broadview edition includes a wide selection of historical documents, from reviews, imitations, and sequels of Coelebs in Search of a Wife to related contemporary writings on conduct, courtship, and women’s education.
Hannah More was an English religious writer and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a clever verse-writer and witty talker in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects on the Puritanic side, and as a practical philanthropist.
She was instrumental in setting up twelve schools by 1800 where reading, the Bible and the catechism - but not writing - were taught to local children. The More sisters met with a good deal of opposition in their works: the farmers thought that education, even to the limited extent of learning to read, would be fatal to agriculture, and the clergy, whose neglect she was making good, accused her of Methodist tendencies.
In her old age, philanthropists from all parts made pilgrimages to see the bright and amiable old lady, and she retained all her faculties until within two years of her death. She spent the last five years of her life in Clifton, and died on 7 September, 1833. She is buried at All Saints' church, Wrington.
Hannah More was an English religious writer, Romantic and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical philanthropist.
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