Accepted by many of her contemporaries as the ultimate authority on the moral life and how to achieve it, Hannah More wrote fiction, poetry, drama, treatises on education, and didactic essays. She concerned herself with the welfare of children, the poor, the middle classes, and the aristocracy, exerting immense influence by her passionate determination to communicate intense religious conviction and to lead others to incorporate such conviction in their lives. To instruct rather than to delight was her primary purpose, in poetry as in prose. But Samuel Johnson (and multitudes of the less illustrious) considered her an accomplished poet, and her best work remains appealing even now for its emotional authenticity and psychological imagination.

The fourth of five daughters of Jacob More, a Gloucestershire schoolmaster, and Mary Grace More, Hannah More was born at Stapleton, near Bristol, on 2 February 1745. She proved a precocious learner, teaching herself to read...