SOURCE: Guest, Harriet. “The Dream of a Common Language: Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft.” Textual Practice 9, no. 2 (summer 1995): 303-23.

In the following essay, Guest considers the similarities between the arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hannah More's Structure, noting especially the representation of the corruption perceived to be endemic among middle-class women.

I

‘Have you read that wonderful book, The Rights of Woman’, wrote Anna Seward to Mr Whalley, on 26 February 1792. ‘It has, by turns, pleased and displeased, startled and half-convinced me that its author is oftener right than wrong.’¹ Seward's enthusiasm for Wollstonecraft's work, and sympathy for the trials of her life, seem to have endured despite her passionate antagonism to political radicalism in England. By August of 1792, she writes, with what is clearly a deeply felt sense of personal as well as political alarm, of:

Paine's pernicious and impossible system of equal...