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 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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Katharine Elwood
Some of the British women writers discussed in the text remain well-known, but others have slipped into obscurity. Memoirs includes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Griselda Murray , Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford , Hester Lynch Piozzi
Textual Production Phebe Gibbes
PG 's next novel, The History of Miss Sommerville, published as a Lady, has not been widely attributed to her; someone ascribed it to Mrs Inchbauld (which the date makes impossible) in the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
It is not clear how much of Bellamy's completed novel ESG actually wrote: as much as the whole of volume three may be hers. Her preface echoes Samuel Johnson when it says the history of...
Material Conditions of Writing Catherine Gore
CG was the first woman to achieve a professional career as a dramatist since Elizabeth Inchbald and Hannah Cowley . She had eleven plays (from one-act farce to high comedy) performed with varying success on...
Literary responses Catherine Gore
Reviews, like that in the Athenæum, were good in the main, and singled out the dialogue for praise even if critical of the character drawing, the plotting, or the level of finish. The Times...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Martha Hale
She writes on public themes with equal panache, attacking colonial appropriations and in another poem calling Warren Hastings an oppressed hero. She addresses public men and women, and here too is attentive to women's issues...
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...
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 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...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
In the early 1820s BH seems to have been at the apex of her career. She was appreciated not only by her friend Mary Russell Mitford (who believed that nobody else could combine so much...
death Thomas Holcroft
A subscription was got up for his widow and children: Elizabeth Inchbald contributed ten pounds.
Hazlitt, William et al. “Introduction”. The Life of Thomas Holcroft, edited by Elbridge Colby, Constable, p. 1: xv - lv.
liv
Intertextuality and Influence Rachel Hunter
Rachel, an heiress, gives her heart to a poor man whose family oppose the match for fear of being seen as mercenary. She is also something of a social rebel, a feminist (fond of gender-bending...
Publishing Catherine Hutton
CH wrote to the publisher Baldwin that Longman's had invited her to contribute to a female paper bearing the names of Barbauld , Inchbald , Edgeworth , and Hamilton .
Hutton, Catherine. Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century. Editor Beale, Catherine Hutton, Cornish Brothers.
159
Textual Features Catherine Hutton
Jane Oakwood's brother has only one woman author (Elizabeth Inchbald ) in his library; Jane on the other hand is a mine of information and opinion about several generations of a female literary tradition...

Timeline

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Texts

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