Hester Chapone née Mulso (27 October 1727, in Twywell, Northamptonshire – 25 December 1801, in Hadwell, Middlesex), was an English writer of conduct books for women.

Hester Chapone became associated with the learned ladies or Bluestockings who gathered around Elizabeth Montagu and wrote Letters on the Improvement of the Mind and Miscellanies.

[3] As Nancy Armstrong writes in her Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987): "So popular did these books become that by the second half of the eighteenth century virtually everyone knew the ideal of womanhood they proposed.

[6] Chapone's work in particular influenced Wollstonecraft in her composition of Thoughts, for its "sustained programme of study for women" and basis on the idea that Christianity should be "the chief instructor of our rational faculties".

[11] The book also appears in Anne Brontë's novel Agnes Grey through one of the characters, and had an influence on Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.

[12] In Chapter 1 of Vanity Fair, Thackeray sums up the self-image of Miss Pinkerton, proprietor of an "academy for young ladies", by describing her as "that majestic lady; the Semiramis of Hammersmith, the friend of Doctor Johnson, the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone herself"; later in the same chapter Miss Pinkerton notes that her establishment, The Mall, enjoyed "the patronage of the admirable Mrs Chapone".