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Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts__ighteenth-century Reader__ Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for __elicious morsels,_ one that spits out __very thing which is plain._ Good books, in contrast, require good readers: __n all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.
Karen Swallow Prior Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More__oet, Reformer, Abolitionist
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Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts__ighteenth-century Reader__ Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for __elicious morsels,_ one that spits out __very thing which is plain._ Good books, in contrast, require good readers: __n all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.
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Karen Swallow Prior

Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More__oet, Reformer, Abolitionist

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