A CONSERVATIVE APPROACH TO WOMEN'S EDUCATION
MORE, Hannah.
Strictures on the modern System of female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune.
London, T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1799.
Two vols, 8vo, pp. I: xix, [1 (blank)], 292; vii, [1 (blank)]; II: 327, [1 (advertisements)]; vol. II printed on light blue paper; tear to vol. II, C1–6, with small marginal loss to a few leaves, minor paperflaw to vol. II, p. 191 affecting only a couple of characters, nevertheless a handsome set; bound in contemporary half polished calf with marbled sides, spines gilt in compartments, red morocco lettering-pieces, gilt crowned monogram to upper compartments of Mary Hill as Marchioness of Downshire (see below).
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Strictures on the modern System of female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune.
Third edition, published in the same year of the first, of this hugely popular educational manual by the evangelical Bluestocking writer and philanthropist Hannah More (1745–1833).
More was first educated by her father and then at the girls’ boarding school he had established in Bristol, where she would later teach. She was a friend of Elizabeth Montagu and Joshua Reynolds, as well as Johnson and Wilberforce. ‘As a consequence of her celebrity as a woman writer copies of her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education ... rushed off the shelves; seven editions were printed in the first year alone. In her review of her contemporary attitudes towards female education she criticized both Jean-Jacques Rousseau's doctrine of sensibility, which turned women into creatures of mere sentiment, and Mary Wollstonecraft's belief in female rights, which encouraged women to adopt an aggressive independence; she proposed that women should be educated neither as Circassians nor as Amazons but as Christians’ (ODNB).
Provenance: from the library of Mary Hill (née Sandys, 1764–1836), Marchioness of Downshire and later Baroness Sandys, a wealthy heiress, society hostess and literary patron, widow of the politician Arthur Hill. Raised by her uncle, one of Samuel Johnson’s ‘Streatham worthies’, she became a friend of both the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert, and once entertained the Prince for four days at the family seat of Ombersley. She built up a fine collection of contemporary fiction, mostly by women, to add to the family library, and took great care over the education of her children following the premature death of her husband.
