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
Literary responses Ann Radcliffe
The Italian won for AR the accolade of praise from Thomas James Matthias , scholar, editor, and librarian at Buckingham Palace, who invoked the shade of Ariosto to honour her in the same place...
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...
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...
Literary responses Anne Plumptre
Kotzebue was then all the rage. The Critical Review discussed AP 's The Natural Son in December 1798, explaining the changes made in her version for stage presentation, and considering her biography of Kotzebue. But...
Textual Production Eliza Parsons
It shared the bill (which was given for the benefit of actress Isabella Mattocks ) with Elizabeth Inchbald 's The Child of Nature (adapted from Genlis ) and The Soldier's Festival; or, The Night before...
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho , the patriotic heroism...
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 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:...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Alice Meynell
Many of the essays reprinted here focus on women writers who were, to put it mildly, little known to the public in the 1940s. These included: Anna Seward and Joanna Baillie , as well as...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Meeke
This novel has unusual interest for modern writers in that it brings into concluding harmony not only Protestant and Catholic but also Jewish characters. The noble or upper-class families with which the story opens are...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Vernon Lee
In her first essay, Lee offers a summary analysis of the English novelistic tradition. Judging them especially, though not entirely, on their treatments of morality, she evaluates writers including Jane Austen , Maria Edgeworth ,...

Timeline

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Texts

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