Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Inchbald
-
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.
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...
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
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...
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...
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
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)...
Literary responses
Maria Edgeworth
Reviewers and ordinary readers devoted themselves at once to the game of identifying real-life originals for the novel's more obnoxious representatives of lawyers, clergymen, etc. Sydney Smith
took offence because he (wrongly) believed himself portrayed...
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...
Perry, Ruth et al. “Introduction”. Henrietta, edited by Ruth Perry et al., University Press of Kentucky.
n39
Sylvia...
Literary responses
Hannah Cowley
Anna Seward
included HC
among her seven celebrated Female Poets
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
59 (1789): 292
of the present day in April 1789. Recent critical comment on her includes an examination of her use of marriage law in...
Occupation
Mary Cowden Clarke
This production was put on (in London and later on tour) to raise money for what was later known as the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
, to pay a Shakespeare curator at Stratford.
Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland.
Before the...
Publishing
Susanna Centlivre
It was published the following month, ascribed to the Author of The Gamester,
Monthly Catalogue, 1714 - 1717. Bernard Lintot.
1 (no. 1): 4
with a dedication to the future George I
. This political gamble (with Queen Anne
still on...
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)...