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
Textual Production Anne Plumptre
Her version of La Perouse was refused a licence, on political grounds, by the censor John Larpent (husband of Anna Margaretta Larpent ). The Natural Son, 1798, was her translation of Das Kind der...
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
The importance of politics in ALB 's journalism is shown by her declining an invitation from Maria Edgeworth in 1804 to associate herself with a journal written entirely by women, on the grounds that the...
Textual Production Elizabeth Hamilton
EH would clearly have been unable, for health reasons, to participate in the abortive Longman 's project reported by Catherine Hutton very shortly before Hamilton died—a projected women's periodical, which was to bear EH 's...
Textual Production Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen inferior to Charlotte Brontë , accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Textual Production Annie Tinsley
AT , as the author of Margaret; or, Prejudice at Home, published a novel with a female first-person protagonist, Women as They Are. By One of Them.
The title of Women as They...
Textual Production Maria Edgeworth
ME 's early letters to her friend Fanny Robinson are earnest and priggish. By the 1790s she was sending the Ruxtons letters which have literary merit in themselves (mixing amusing anecdote and expressions of affection)...
Textual Production Rose Tremain
RT published a novel entitled Music and Silence, which she dedicated to her daughter, Eleanor.
Scholar John Mullan has related the title to others employing two abstract nouns, like Elizabeth Inchbald 's Nature and...
Textual Production Eglinton Wallace
It was (as the title-page acknowledged) based on a French original, Guerre ouverte, ou ruse contre ruse, by Antoine-Jean Bourlin , who used the pseudonym Dumaniant. Elizabeth Inchbald translated the same play under...
Textual Production Maria Edgeworth
The Longman 's project reported by Catherine Hutton on 13 June this year, for a women's periodical bearing the names of ME , BarbauldInchbald , and Hamilton , seems not to have materialised. It...
Textual Production Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ took occasion, in a review of Joanna Baillie for the Athenæum, to praise not only Baillie but also Ann Radcliffe , Elizabeth Inchbald , and Mary Wollstonecraft .
Wilkes, Joanne. “’Only the broken music’? The Critical Writings of Maria Jane Jewsbury”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 1, pp. 105-18.
115
Textual Production Amelia Opie
AO was an indefatigable letter-writer. Her surviving correspondence at the Huntington Library includes 331 letters (1794-1850). Most are written by her to her cousin Eliza (Alderson) Briggs or her husband; a few are from her...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
The series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
Textual Features Charlotte McCarthy
Here CMC voices various complaints: of sufferings caused by the Dearness of Provisions, of the impossibility of women's earning a living, of the nation's wickedness, the decline of charity, the prevalence of atheists, and of...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Features Leah Sumbel
Over the signature Old Kent, Mary Wells (later LS ) contributed to The World theatre criticism and reports of, for instance, the trial of Warren Hastings . She and her friend Elizabeth Inchbald supplied...

Timeline

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Texts

Inchbald, Elizabeth. Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797.