Hester Chapone

English writer

• Born: October 27, 1727
• Birthplace: Twywell, Northamptonshire, England
• Died: December 25, 1801
• Place of death: Hadley, Middlesex, England

Chapone was an important voice for women’s rights. Her best-known work, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, laid out a plan for the education of young women. Her exemplary life made it clear that learned women were at least as virtuous as those whom society deliberately kept ignorant. Furthermore, her letters to the novelist Samuel Richardson, arguing against slavish filial obedience, were so persuasive that he altered his novel Clarissa to make it better conform to her thinking.

Early Life

Hester Chapone (sheh-POHN), born Hester Mulso, was the daughter of Thomas Mulso, a gentleman farmer, and his wife, whose family name was Thomas. Hester’s mother is said to have been a beautiful but vain woman who did not approve of educating girls or women. Her daughter was not good-looking, but she was a precocious child. When Hester was nine, she wrote a romance, “The Loves of Amoret and Melissa.” Although her mother disapproved of the work, indeed, of Hester’s writing anything at all, her father and her three brothers were sure that it showed great promise.

It was undoubtedly because of the efforts of the men in her family that Hester received an education far better than that of most girls. She learned French, Italian, and Latin, as well as drawing and music. Because her voice was so lovely, she was soon nicknamed the “linnet,” after the finch of the same name. Despite her mother’s disapproval, Hester was writing serious poetry by the time she was just eighteen years old.

While she was attending the races in Canterbury, Hester met Elizabeth Carter, a classical scholar, much-published author, and a longtime friend of Samuel Richardson and the famous writer Samuel Johnson. Through Carter, Hester met other members of the group of literary and other intellectual women—named the Bluestockings after the literary club of the same name—and was introduced to their illustrious friends. Thus, by the time she had reached her early twenties, Hester had gained acceptance by some of the most brilliant writers, critics, and conversationalists of her time.

Life’s Work

In the fall of 1750, Hester Chapone’s verbal dispute with Samuel Richardson about his insistence on filial obedience in his novel Clarissa led Chapone to voice her objections in the form of three well-reasoned letters to him, the final one dated January 3, 1751. Though these letters were not published until after her death, they were widely circulated at the time they were written. Chapone had been called a “little spitfire” by Richardson, and she was not pleased. However, she did not back down, and when the third edition of his novel came out, he had modified the plot.

Chapone also had circulated some of her poems and composed a Pindaric ode asserting the superiority of the Christian view of life over that of the Stoics. (A Pindaric ode is an ode—or lyric poem—written especially for choral song and dance.) Chapone’s collection was published in 1758 in Elizabeth Carter’s Epictetus. In 1750, Chapone wrote four fictional letters for Johnson’s literary magazine, The Rambler, and, in 1753, the “Story of Fidelia,” a cautionary tale about a woman brought by Deists to the brink of damnation, appeared in The Adventurer. In 1755, Johnson published a quatrain of Chapone’s poem “To Stella” in A Dictionary of the English Language.

It was in 1754 that Hester Chapone became engaged to John Chapone, a law student, whom she probably met through Richardson. However, her father did not feel that John would be able to support a wife, and even after her father allowed the marriage to take place six years later, the young couple had financial difficulties. Nevertheless, Hester Chapone was evidently deeply in love with her husband, and when he died in September, 1761, less than ten months after the wedding, she became desperately ill. Even after she recovered, she told her new friend Elizabeth Montagu, the leader of the Bluestockings, that she still missed him desperately.

Chapone was left so little by her husband that she had to sell her possessions, and she remained relatively poor the rest of her life. When her father died in 1763, she received a small bequest from him, but she did not have enough money to maintain a household, and from that time on she spent much of her days with friends and family members, including her uncle, the bishop of Winchester, who was in residence at Farnham Castle.

Although her friend Montagu brought her offers to serve as a governess, Chapone declined them, deciding instead to see how well she could do with her writing. In 1770, with Montagu’s encouragement, Chapone decided to publish the letters of advice about the education of girls that she had been sending to her niece Jane during the previous five years. Montagu volunteered to be her editor, and Chapone spent the next three years rewriting and revising Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, which she dedicated to Montagu. It was a great success, but because she had turned over the copyright to the publisher for just œ50, she made little profit from the work. Chapone did better financially with Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1775), which was dedicated to Elizabeth Carter. It was followed with Letter to a New-Married Lady (1777), which was later included in a subsequent edition of Miscellanies. Chapone continued to write, but she no longer attempted to augment her income by publishing her work.

During the next two decades, however, Chapone continued to attend the Bluestocking assemblies, and sometimes she would entertain them more modestly. She also exerted her considerable influence in the literary world by supporting other women writers. As late as 1789, she was still able to write a well-crafted poem, in which she urged Charlotte Smith and William Bowles to write less depressing sonnets.

During her final years, Chapone lived with her youngest niece in a rented house in Hadley, Middlesex. In 1799, when she was seventy-two years old, she had to admit that her memory had become untrustworthy, making it impossible for her to continue even with her correspondence. She died in Hadley on December 25, 1801. In 1807, her family published The Posthumous Works of Mrs. Chapone, consisting mostly of letters, including the series on filial obedience that had been sent to Samuel Richardson. The first collection of her works appeared that same year.

Significance

As one of the early Bluestockings, Hester Chapone demonstrated to men of letters and to aristocrats of an intellectual bent that an educated woman could hold her own in rational discourse. Her intellectual brilliance, combined with her sparkling personality, made her an ideal advocate for women’s rights. She was able to convince some of the most conservative members of a patriarchal society that a young woman should have at least the right of refusal when a father had chosen her future husband. In addition, both by her words and by her example, Chapone persuaded that same society that proper self-education would make women better wives and more devout Christians.

Chapone’s works are read by scholars mostly. Her poetic abilities and her deft touch with the essay form made it clear to her contemporaries, however, that women could be writers, and writers on a par with men. She prepared the way for the next generation of Bluestockings, who would not hesitate to devote their lives to literature.

Bibliography

Binhammer, Katherine, and Jeanne Wood. Women and Literary History: “For There She Was.” Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Essays on the way literary history has dealt with women’s writing. Important background material for any study of the Bluestockings.

Chapone, Hester. Letters on the Improvement of the Mind. 1773. Reprint. Brookfield, Vt.: William Pickering, 1996. Volume 2 of the Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment series, this is a reprint of Chapone’s classic work.

Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1990. Chapone is one of four early Bluestockings on whom this book focuses. By proceeding chronologically and interweaving their life stories, the author explains their interconnectedness as well as their differences. Illustrated.

Pohl, Nicole, and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds. Reconsidering the Bluestockings. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2003. This useful volume contains an introductory historiography of the Bluestockings, biographical sketches, a number of essays, a bibliography, and an index.

Wilson, Mona. These Were Muses. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970. Chapone is discussed in the chapter “An Unaffected Blue-Stocking” in this lively, illustrated book.

Zuk, Rhoda, ed. Catherine Talbot and Hester Chapone. Vol. 3 in Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1785. Edited by Gary Kelly. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999. Includes Chapone’s “Letters on Filial Obedience,” “A Matrimonial Creed,” “A Letter to a New-Married Lady,” and five of her published poems. The section on Chapone’s life contains a general introduction, bibliography, and chronology, as well as comments and notes on each of her included works.