Born [Elizabeth Simpson], at Stanningfield, Suffolk, 15 Oct. 1753. Left home in April 1772, with intention of going on the London stage. Married to Joseph Inchbald, 9 June 1772. First appeared on the stage at Bristol, 4 Sept. 1772. Acting with her husband in Scotland, 1772–76. In Paris, July to Sept. 1776. Acting with her husband in England, 1776–79: he died, suddenly, 6 June 1779. Friendship with Mrs. Siddons and J. P. Kemble. Continued to act at York till 1780. At Covent Garden, Oct. 1780 to July 1782; at Haymarket, July to Sept. 1782; in Dublin, Nov. 1782 to spring of 1783; returned to Covent Garden, 1783. Play, “The Mogul Tale,” produced at Haymarket, 1784. Plays produced at Haymarket, Covent Garden, and Drury Lane, 1784–1805. Contrib. to “Edinburgh Review.” Retired from stage, 1789. Died, at Kensington House, 1 Aug. 1821. Buried in Kensington Churchyard. Works: “Appearance is against them” (anon.), 1785; “I’ll Tell you What,” 1786; “The Widow’s Vow” (anon.), 1786; “The Mogul Tale” (anon.), 1788; “Such Things Are,” 1788 (2nd edn. same year); “The Midnight Hour” (from the French of Damaniant), 1787; “The Child of Nature” (from the French of Countess de Genlis), 1788; “Animal Magnetism” (anon.), 1788; “The Married Man” (from the French of Néricault-Destouches), 1789; “Next Door Neighbours,” 1791; “A Simple Story” (4 vols.), 1791; “Everyone has his Fault,” 1793; “The Wedding Day,” 1794; “Nature and Art” (2 vols.), 1796; “Wives as they Were, and Maids as they Are,” 1797; “Lovers’ Vows” (from the German of Kotzebue), 1798; “The Wise Men of the East” (from the German of Kotzebue), 1799; “To Marry or Not to Marry,” 1805. She edited: “The British Theatre” (25 vols.), 1808; “The Modern Theatre” (10 vols.), 1811; “A Collection of Farces” (7 vols.), 1815; and contributed “remarks” to plays by Addison, Cibber, Colman, Lillo, Machlin, Norton, Otway, Rowe, Shakespeare, Southerne, Thomson. Life: “Memoirs,” by J. Boaden (2 vols.), 1833.

Personal

  She was in truth a figure that could not be seen without astonishment at its loveliness—tall, slender, straight, of the purest complexion and most beautiful features. Her hair of a golden auburn, her eyes full at once of spirit and sweetness; a combination of delicacy that checked presumption and interest that captivated the fancy.

  At all times Mrs. Inchbald seems to have determined to retain her perfect independence, and to have chosen to have her time and property at her own disposal. She had an enthusiastic love of Home, although that home was often, indeed generally, only a single, or at most a couple of rooms up two or three pairs of stairs, occasionally in the attic, where she was waited on by the servant of the house, or sometimes not waited on at all, for she not unfrequently speaks of fetching her own water, and dressing her own dinner; and she once kept a coroneted carriage waiting whilst she finished scouring her apartment…. At one time she took up her abode in a boarding-house; but she could not, she said, when there, command her appetite and be hungry at stated periods, like the rest of the boarders, so she generally returned to “her attic, her crust of bread, and liberty.”

  Living in mean lodgings, dressed with an economy allied to penury, without connections, and alone, her beauty, her talents, and the charm of her manners gave her entrance into a delightful circle of society. Apt to fall in love, and desirous to marry, she continued single, because the men who loved and admired her were too worldly to take an actress and a poor author, however lovely and charming for a wife. Her life was thus spent in an interchange of hardship and amusement, privation and luxury. Her character partook of the same contrast: fond of pleasure, she was prudent in her conduct; penurious in her personal expenditure, she was generous to others. Vain of her beauty, we are told that the gown she wore was not worth a shilling, it was so coarse and shabby. Very susceptible to the softer feelings, she could yet guard herself against passion; and though she might have been called a flirt, her character was unimpeached. I have heard that a rival beauty of her day pettishly complained that when Mrs. Inchbald came into a room, and sat in a chair in the middle of it as was her wont, every man gathered round it, and it was vain for any other woman to attempt to gain attention. Godwin could not fail to admire her: she became and continued to be a favourite. Her talents, her beauty, her manners, were all delightful to him. He used to describe her as a piquante mixture between a lady and a milkmaid, and added that Sheridan declared she was the only authoress whose society pleased him.

  She was very beautiful, and gifted with original genius, as her plays and farces and novels (above all, the “Simple Story”) testify; she was not an actress of any special merit, but of respectable mediocrity. She stuttered habitually, but her delivery was never impeded by this defect on the stage…. Mrs Inchbald was a person of a very remarkable character, lovely, poor, with unusual mental powers, and of irreproachable conduct…. Mrs. Inchbald had a singular uprightness and unworldliness, and a childlike directness and simplicity of manner, which, combined with her personal loveliness, and halting, broken utterance, gave to her conversation, which was both humorous and witty, a most peculiar and comical charm.

  Elizabeth Inchbald was an admirable woman, a heroine in her way, not, indeed, after the manner of Miss Pinkerton, the Semiramis of Hammersmith, but a warm, human personality, all the more lovable for some feminine foibles. She was an actress and authoress of no mean celebrity, she attained competency and fame, but the thought that remains with us, as we rise from the perusal of her diary and “Memoirs,” is how ill fame and fortune supply the want of love in a woman’s life, what avoid they still leave unsatisfied; yet the prevailing note in her life is of cheerfulness and bright vivacity.

A Simple Story, 1791

  But there were no “Waverly Novels” in those days, no Jane Austen, no Maria Edgeworth; and the “Simple Story” was highly prized by its contemporaries…. But nobody now-a-days suggests of a female novelist that “it is as if Venus had written books.” The reader will remember how this Venus wrote to Godwin when his wife lay yet unburied.

  The “Simple Story,” appeared in February and a second edition was ordered in March. It has become a classic, and nothing need here be said in praise of its pathos, its knowledge of human nature, and the epigrammatic touches in which it abounds. The novel brought her not only money and fame, but a flock of new friends…. In literature, as in life, it is not always the most famous or distinguished persons that are the most interesting. Elizabeth Inchbald cannot claim high rank in the former class, but her character, her letters, and her “Simple Story” leave her with few rivals in the latter.

  Built upon the unpromising motive of displaying “the improper education of the unthinking Miss Milner” is a powerful picture of passion, even prophetic of “Jane Eyre” than any other English novel of the eighteenth century.

  Though marred by the author’s anxiety to attribute to the influence of early education the gradual moral decay of her heroine, it contains the strongest situation that had yet appeared in the English novel—the conflict between religious prejudice and love, such as we have on a grander scale in Charles Reade’s “Cloister and the Hearth.”

General

  If Mrs Radcliffe touched the trembling chords of the imagination, making wild music there, Mrs Inchbald has no less power over the spring of the heart. She not only moves the affections, but melts us into “all the luxury of woe.” Her “Nature and Art” is one of the most pathetic and interesting stories in the world. It is indeed too much so; the distress is too naked, and the situation hardly to be borne with patience.

  As a dramatist, she is distinguished for a certain ingenuity and vivacity of dialogue; her wit however is infrequent, and the intrigues of her comedies often present the unnatural combinations of farce. Her plays, with few exceptions, still retain the stage. Her talents as a novelist were by no means inferior; and had she devoted her whole attention to this department of literature she would undoubtedly have produced works of lasting celebrity.

  In 1789, when she retired from the stage, her reputation was at its highest. She had published an edition of plays with prefaces, and now she got fifty guineas by merely looking over a catalogue of fifty farces, drawing her pen across one or two, and writing the names of others in their places. The catalogue was then printed with “SELECTED BY MRS. INCHBALD” on the title-page.

  The scene where William [in “Nature and Art”], as a judge, condemns to death the girl he had deceived and deserted is great, not from the boisterous strength of the situation, but from the strength of its telling. That and the character of Miss Milner in “A Simple Story” entitled Mrs. Inchbald to a very high place among the novelists proper of her day.