Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry:

The Story of a Literary Relationship

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Kerri Andrews

Gender and Genre

Hannah More and Ann Yearsley experienced a long-standing relationship that lasted far beyond their short-lived roles as patron and protégée. More had originally come to prominence as a playwright under the patronage of celebrated actor/manager David Garrick. When an established writer herself, she was able to assist Yearsley, bringing the young poet’s rustic voice to the attention of an eighteenth-century society hungry for the fashionable phenomenon of the ‘rural genius’.

This study offers a timely and necessary reassessment of the careers of both Yearsley and More. Making use of newly-discovered letters and poems, Andrews provides a full analysis of the breakdown of the two writers’ affiliation and compares it to other labouring-class relationships based on patronage. Their writings on Abolition are examined together in the context of their association with the port of Bristol and Yearsley and More’s reputations at the time of their deaths – 1806 and 1833, respectively – are considered.

Readership

Literature, Slavery and Abolition, Print Culture and Eighteenth-Century Studies

Contents

Introduction
1 Hannah More and David Garrick: The Creation of a Literary Phenomenon
2 A Middling-Class Poet-Maker: Hannah More and Ann Yearsley
3 Patronage, Gratitude and Friendship, 1785–90
4 'Such is Bristol's Soul': Patronage and Competition
5 Novel-Writing and the French Revolution
6 Business and Bankruptcy in the 1790s
Conclusion

Related titles

• Conduct Literature for Women, Part IV, 1770–1830
• Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets
• Lives of Shakespearian Actors, Part I: David Garrick, Charles Macklin and Margaret Woffington by their Contemporaries
• Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dialogues and Debts, 1784–1821
• Memoirs of Women Writers
• Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period
• The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley
• The Political Writings of the 1790s
• The Works of Mary Robinson

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