Page "Hester Chapone" Paragraph 5

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.