Elizabeth Inchbald

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Standard Name: Inchbald, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Simpson
Married Name: Elizabeth Inchbald
Pseudonym: Mrs Woodley
Nickname: Mrs Perfection
EI was a diarist from her teens. Before and after her debut on as an actress on the London stage in 1780, she considered writing as a way to make a living. Before she had made any headway getting her first novel accepted, she became a prolific dramatist: she wrote or translated twenty-one plays (about half of them adaptations). Three major theatrical editing projects appeared under her name. In the early twenty-first century her reputation stands high both as novelist and dramatist.
Photograph of a painting of Elizabeth Inchbald by Thomas Lawrence, c. 1796. She is shown from the waist up, wearing a white cap atop light brown curls. Her dress is white, with a white collar, and the background is a rich brown. The bottom part of the picture is unfinished, only a few sketched lines on blank board.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Thomas Holcroft
A subscription was got up for his widow and children: Elizabeth Inchbald contributed ten pounds.
Hazlitt, William, Thomas Holcroft, and William Hazlitt. “Introduction”. The Life of Thomas Holcroft, edited by Elbridge Colby, Constable, 1925, p. 1: xv - lv.
liv
Family and Intimate relationships Maria Edgeworth
Maria mourned so intensely that she fell ill. She was pleased by a letter from Barbara Hofland recognising the very special nature of her loss; on the other hand she was offended at Elizabeth Inchbald
Friends, Associates Anne Plumptre
Elizabeth Inchbald had written in veiled terms to Morgan before the latter's marriage of her own brief and unhappy acquaintance (something like patronage) withAP . This experience (which, she says, was well known to...
Friends, Associates Mary Wollstonecraft
At this time MW 's achievements were admired by Southey , Coleridge , and many English Jacobins who felt themselves oppressed. Her friends included Elizabeth Inchbald , Mary Robinson , and more warmly Eliza Fenwick
Friends, Associates Anna Letitia Barbauld
Although their meetings were cordial, Lamb criticised her, as well as her writings, as an intellectual woman. He commented to Coleridge that (apart from Elizabeth Inchbald ) he found clever women impudent, forward, unfeminine, and...
Friends, Associates Mary Hays
This was her most formative and most famous friendship. She had approached Wollstonecraft after the latter published Vindication of the Rights of Woman early that same year. Wollstonecraft proved a valuable professional mentor. Another relationship...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
At the same period EOB was a friend of another miscellaneous writer, Elizabeth Isabella Spence , who entertained in the same eccentric, low-budget style. These two elderly ladies (Spence was ten years older than Benger)...
Friends, Associates Mary Hays
After Wollstonecraft's death, and Fenwick's departure from England, it seems unlikely that MH found female friends to replace them, though she knew well such people as Elizabeth Inchbald , Anna Letitia Barbauld , and Charles
Friends, Associates Charlotte Smith
Probably after Mary Wollstonecraft's death, CS became a friend of William Godwin , Elizabeth Inchbald , and Eliza Fenwick . Also a friend was the publisher Joseph Johnson .
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan, 1998.
261, 288
Friends, Associates Leah Sumbel
Mary Wells (later LS ) drew her female friends from both the theatre and the demi-monde: they included Elizabeth Sarah Gooch and Mary Robinson , as well as the highly respectable Elizabeth Inchbald .
Friends, Associates Susannah Dobson
SD , along with the novelist Charlotte Lennox and Sylvia (Braithwaite) Thornton (the wife from 1768 of Bonnell Thornton ), belonged to a network of devoted friends centred on Lydia, Lady Clerke .
Perry, Ruth, Susan Carlile, and Charlotte Lennox. “Introduction”. Henrietta, edited by Ruth Perry, Susan Carlile, Ruth Perry, and Susan Carlile, University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
n39
Sylvia...
Friends, Associates Amelia Opie
In London she met many artists, writers, and politically active reformists: as well as Godwin , she met Elizabeth Inchbald , Mary Wollstonecraft (who impressed her deeply, and trusted her enough to confide her plans...
Friends, Associates Amelia Opie
In 1813 she again met de Staël (who was visiting London) and introduced her to Elizabeth Inchbald . Others she met after her husband's death included Richard Brinsley Sheridan , Byron , and Sir Walter Scott
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Ann Kelty
Her narratives of these emotional involvements lead her into analysis of the different effects of love on the two sexes. This analysis is founded on two women writers (identifiable although she does not name them)...
Intertextuality and Influence Sophia King
The novel opens with a philosophical dialogue (between males) which makes reference to Voltaire , Hume , Rousseau , and Godwin 's Caleb Williams. Its subtitle sounds like a pointer to autobiographical content, and...

Timeline

1 December 1759
John Hawkesworth in turn adapted Thomas Southerne 's dramatic adaptation of Aphra Behn 's Oroonoko, making it for the first time a solidly anti-slavery text.
27 August 1784
Following the first balloon ascents of the Montgolfierbrothers and Vincenzo Lunardi in November 1783, James Tytler made the first balloon ascent in Britain: he reached a height of 350 feet at Comely Gardens, Edinburgh.
June 1787
Thomas Bellamy launched The General Magazine and Impartial Review, which continued with variations in subtitle until December 1792.
18 February 1792
Thomas Holcroft 's playThe Road to Ruin, which Elizabeth Inchbald ranked among the most successful of modern plays,
Hazlitt, William, Thomas Holcroft, and William Hazlitt. “Introduction”. The Life of Thomas Holcroft, edited by Elbridge Colby, Constable, 1925, p. 1: xv - lv.
xxvii-xxviii
had its premiere.
The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.
5: 1428
14 June 1792
The title of radical novelist Robert Bage 's anonymous Man As He Is, published this day, suggests the unpalatable truths revealed by reformers or satirists; it influenced later titles chosen by William Godwin and others.
By 22 July 1797
William Beckford published a second and more marked burlesque attack on women's writing: Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel. Interspersed with Pieces of Poetry.
1804
The publisher George, George, and John Robinson , whose list of women writers had been distinguished, went bankrupt.
Early 1818
William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets, the last of his Lectures on the English Poets, with a statement on gender issues.
11 October 1819
The Theatre Royal , Bury St Edmunds, owned by its architect, William Wilkins , opened as a state-of-the-art modern theatre.
April 1879
James Murray —editor since 1 March of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary—issued an Appeal for readers to supply illustrative quotations.
1994
Juggernaut was set up as a small New York theatre company; in 2001 it decided to publicise the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women playwrights.