Mary Froud[e] 

Mary (‘Amanda’) Froud[e] (b. 1753), sister of Sarah Froud (see entry above) and distant relation of Mary Steele of Broughton, taught for many years at the school in Park Street operated by Hannah More and her sisters. Froud would maintain her friendship with Hannah More after her departure from the school. In a letter to William Wilberforce, 2 September 1823, More writes about Joseph Cottle’s recent attack against the Revd Robert Hawker, vicar of Charles Church, Plymouth, and mentions Miss Froude:

I must desire you to get from Cadells a new pamphlet called ‘the Plymouth Antinomians’ The Object is most important, and this growing pernicious heresy is powerfully exposed ...  you would not expect to hear that my old friend Cottle is the Author He is a better Divine than Poet Hawker and his Crew are doing incalculable mischief, and it is spreading far and wide.  My friend Miss Froud who spent a year with the Exmouths of Plymouth saw and heard him often, and confirms all that Cottle has said.  She heard him say that the Bishop of Gloucester was ‘an enemy to the Cross of Christ’, and another deeply serious minister, was a ‘work monger’. He has one of the largest Congregations in the Kingdom.

Mary Froude, who never married, was visiting her sister, Susan.  See Hannah More to William Wilberforce, 2 September 1823, Wilberforce Papers, Duke University. For more on the Frouds, see  Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3; Timothy Whelan, “Mary Scott, Sarah Froud, and the Steele Literary Circle: A Revealing Annotation to The Female Advocate.” Huntington Library Quarterly 77.4 (2015), 435-52; John Broome, A Bruised Reed: The Life and Times of Anne Steele. (Harpenden: Gospel Standard Trust Publications, 2007), 121; and Marjorie Reeves, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture 1700–1900 (London: University of Leicester Press, 1997; 2000), 3-10.