Hester Chapone - Conduct Books

Conduct Books

The former was first written for her 15-year-old niece, in 1773, but by 1800 it had been through at least 16 editions. A further 12 editions appeared until 1829, at least one of them a French translation. They focused on encouraging rational understanding through the reading of the Bible, history and literature. The girl was also supposed to study book-keeping, household management and botany, geology, astronomy. Only sentimental novels were to be avoided. Mary Wollstonecraft singled it out as one of the few examples of the self-improvement genre deserving of praise.

This tide of advice or conduct books reached its height between 1760 and 1820 in Britain; one scholar refers to the period as "the age of courtesy books for women". As Nancy Armstrong writes in her seminal work on this genre, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987): "so popular did these books become that by the second half of the eighteenth century virtually everyone knew the ideal of womanhood they proposed". Chapone's is a typical example.

Conduct books integrated the styles and rhetorics of earlier genres, such as devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and works on household economy. They offered their readers a description of (most often) the ideal woman while at the same time handing out practical advice. Thus, not only did they dictate morality, but they also guided readers' choice of dress and outlined "proper" etiquette. Chapone's work, in particular, appealed to Wollstonecraft at this time and influenced her composition of Thoughts because it argued "for a sustained programme of study for women" and was based on the idea that Christianity should be "the chief instructor of our rational faculties". Moreover, it emphasized that women should be considered rational beings and not left to wallow in sensualism. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, she drew on both Chapone and Macaulay's works. Another admirer, and also a personal friend, was the novelist and diarist Frances Burney. Their surviving correspondence includes a letter of condolence of 4 April 1799, from Burney to Chapone, on the death in childbirth of Jane Jeffreyes, née Mulso, the niece to whom the Letters on the Improvement of the Mind had been addressed.