ABSTRACT
This chapter examines published and unpublished writings on happiness, a much discussed topic of the eighteenth century, by the Baptist woman writer Anne Steele (1717–1778), who is best known in literary history as the “mother” of English hymn writing. Although she was not the first woman to write hymns, she was the first major woman hymn writer and set a successful precedent for women’s hymn writing through her publication of Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (1760). This chapter demonstrates that while Steele repeatedly emphasised in her published works that happiness is a state only found in heaven, in her private writings, she explored wider possibilities. Specifically, she suggested that happiness as a woman may be found in the freedoms of writing and being unmarried.
