SOURCE: Donkin, Ellen. “The Paper War of Hannah Cowley and Hannah More.” In Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660-1820, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, pp. 143-62. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Donkin discusses the charges of plagiarism leveled against More by the playwright Hannah Cowley and suggests that the real problem between the two women was precipitated by the death of their mentor, David Garrick, and the mismanagement of their plays by his successors.

In January of 1779 David Garrick died, leaving in his wake a group of women playwrights who suddenly found themselves without a mentor. In the vacuum created by his death, a brief but violent controversy erupted between the two most prominent of these playwrights, Hannah Cowley (1743-1809) and Hannah More (1745-1833), both of whom had made successful theater debuts as the result of Garrick's careful...