… of women and the evils of slavery. She devised an original philanthropic model of sociability, a sociability of the heart, with a strongly religious dimension, thus outlining a new role for women as prime agents of social and moral … the reformation of manners, the abolition of slavery, the education of women and the alleviation of poverty. Having started as a provincial schoolteacher living in Bristol and educated in her father’s school, she soon became the author of … and Horace Walpole. What has been called ‘the Complicated Temptation of the theatre’ 2 reveals a tension at the heart of her early life between indulging in the pleasures of sociability, albeit literary sociability, and the seriousness …