Hester Chapone

Hester Chapone, née Mulso (27 October 1727, Twywell, Northamptonshire – 1801), was an English writer of conduct books for women.

The daughter of Thomas Mulso (1695–1763), a gentleman farmer, and his wife (died 1747/8), a daughter of Colonel Thomas, Hester wrote a romance at the age of nine, "The Loves of Amoret and Melissa", which earned her mother's disapproval. She was educated more thoroughly than most girls in that period, learning French, Italian and Latin, and began writing regularly and corresponding with other writers at the age of 18. Her earliest published works were four brief pieces written for Samuel Johnson's journal The Rambler in 1750. She was married in 1760 to the solicitor John Chapone (c.1728–1761), who was the son of an earlier moral writer, Sarah Chapone (1699–1764), but soon widowed. Hester Chapone was associated with the learned ladies or who gathered around Elizabeth Montagu, and was the author of Letters on the Improvement of the Mind and Miscellanies. She died at Hadley, Middlesex, on 25 December 1801.

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 had appeared by 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 addressed 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 that deserved praise.

The tide of advice or conduct books in Britain reached its height between 1760 and 1820; 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.

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