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Inchbald:
Source: Jane Spencer, ‘Inchbald , Elizabeth (1753–1821)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14374, accessed 28 May 2008]
Inchbald [née Simpson], Elizabeth (1753–1821), writer and actress, was born on 15
October 1753 in Standingfield, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, the youngest child but
one in the large family of John Simpson (d. 1761), farmer, and his wife, Mary (d. 1783),
daughter of William Rushbrook of Flimpton.
Early life, marriage, and first acting roles
Elizabeth Simpson's family was Roman Catholic and had many friends in local Catholic
circles. Her biographer calls her father's living a ‘moderate farm’, but does not indicate
how well the family fared after his death. Educated with her sisters at home while her
brother went to school, Elizabeth later remarked that the girls, but not their brother,
learned to spell: this showed, she thought, that girls were more ‘inclined to literature’
(Boaden, Inchbald, 1.6). Her own literary interests were sharpened by her speech
difficulties. Ambitious from an early age to become an actress, she worked hard to
overcome her stammer, and in early 1770 attempted to get an engagement at the Norwich
Theatre. Her family visited theatres and had acquaintances among actors, and there were
dramatic readings at home; but Elizabeth's acting ambitions were discouraged. Her
brother George became an actor in 1770. In April 1772 Elizabeth set off without
permission for London, leaving her mother a defensive note: ‘[I] cannot prove my
affection;—yet time may’ (ibid., 1.18). She took lodgings and tried to get stage
engagements, but soon decided to stay with her sister for protection. She encountered
harassment, including sexual advances from the theatre manager Dodd, which she is said
to have answered with a faceful of hot water; and within a couple of months she agreed to
marry the actor Joseph Inchbald (1735–1779), who had been courting her since the
previous year. Boaden remarks that he was not ‘the object of her romantic love’ (ibid.,
1.96), and it is likely that she decided upon marriage as a way of gaining a protected
entrance into her chosen profession. They were married in a Catholic ceremony on 9 June
1772 and by protestant rites the following day. Immediately afterwards they went to
Bristol, where her husband had acting engagements, and where she made her début as
Cordelia to his Lear on 4 September.
From 1772 to 1776 the Inchbalds toured Scotland with West Digges's theatre company,
acting in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. Despite her determined practising, walking
the hills and shores with her husband listening to her recitals, Inchbald was never a very
good actress, but she continued to perform a variety of roles and to supplement her wages
by ‘walking on’ in the pantomime. The touring life was a hard one: travelling, they were
caught in storms and had to walk long distances in the rain, and her health was
undermined by the consequent attacks of ague and fever. Her marriage was difficult, too.
She did not enjoy her role as stepmother to her husband's illegitimate son Robert, whose
mother is not known. Robert was in the same company playing children's roles, and
Elizabeth insisted on his lodging separately from the couple in Edinburgh. Her husband
also had another, older son, George, whose mother may or may not have been the same
as Robert's. Elizabeth and her husband quarrelled over money and her independence: he
objected to her receiving her own salary separately from his, and to her friendships with
other men, and she objected to his drinking sessions with friends.
In 1776 the Inchbalds left Digges's company after an incident in which Joseph had
antagonized the audience. They now had to find alternative ways of earning a living.
Joseph decided to study painting in France, while Elizabeth, who had already been
studying the language, resolved to continue her French studies and to try and write for the
stage. After their brief stay in France, abandoned because of their shortage of money,
they were for a while destitute in Brighton, where they ‘once went into the fields to eat
turnips instead of dining’ (Boaden, Inchbald, 1.68). At this point Elizabeth was still on
bad terms with her mother, and the latter had refused to help the couple with money.
Later Elizabeth seems to have been reconciled with her mother, visiting her in
Standingfield several times before Mary Simpson's death in 1783. Her family
connections were important to her, and she sent money to members of her family
whenever she could, from her acting wages and later from the profits of her writing.
Perhaps she hoped in this way to make up for running away to the stage and marrying
Inchbald.
Later in 1776 the Inchbalds managed to get another theatrical engagement, with Younger
in Liverpool. Here Elizabeth met the actress Sarah Siddons, who became a lifelong friend,
and her brother, the actor John Philip Kemble. Her friendship with Kemble was intense,
and sometimes quarrelsome; the relationship between the coquettish, passionate Miss
Milner and her stern guardian in A Simple Story may be based in part on it. Like her
other friendships it aroused her husband's jealousy. Siddons and Kemble seem to have
been an intellectual stimulus to the incipient writer, who was educating herself during this
period by reading in English, and in Latin literature in translation. She began writing a
novel (possibly, but not certainly, an early version of A Simple Story), and corresponded
with Kemble about it. She tried unsuccessfully to get this novel published in 1779.
The Inchbalds continued to change company, moving to Dimond's company in
Canterbury, where Elizabeth acted with Thomas Holcroft, and then to the Yorkshire
company led by Tate Wilkinson, who remembered her as ‘my well-beloved, my beautiful
Mrs. Inchbald’ (Wilkinson, 1.277). Joseph Inchbald died suddenly in 1779. His widow
carried on acting for Wilkinson for a while, and then spent the next few years acting in
London and Dublin. With the freedom of widowhood came, once again, the pitfalls of
being a young single woman on the stage in a society that judged women by increasingly
stringent criteria of delicate behaviour. She enjoyed a lively social life, risking censorious
comment on the one hand, and unwanted sexual attention on the other. Boaden recounts a
number of flirtations enjoyed and proposals refused in these years.
Writing for the stage
Inchbald acted for seventeen years, taking a great number of different roles in
Shakespearian drama, seventeenth-century comedies and tragedies, and more recent plays.
Her leading roles in tragedies included the heroine of Jane Shore, Calista in The Fair
Penitent, Monimia in The Orphan, and Desdemona in Othello. In comedies her roles
included Violante in The Wonder, Angelica in The Constant Couple, and Indiana in The
Constant Lover. She also played the cross-dressing heroine Bellario in Philaster. She
acted in new plays of the 1780s, including Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem. She
was painted as Lady Jane Grey and as the Lady Abbess in The Comedy of Errors; but
apart from this she never seems to have become well known for any particular role, and
her acting was never critically acclaimed. From at least the mid-1770s, she was
considering writing as a possible alternative to this only moderately successful stage
career. Her acting experience gave her a knowledge of stage techniques, and familiarized
her with a wide range of stage plots and character types that she drew on for her own
plays. Her stage experience was also put to use in her fiction, with its tight, dramatic
dialogues and its use of themes from earlier dramatists. Her Shakespearian roles included
Hermione in The Winter's Tale and Perdita in an adaptation from the same play, Florizel
and Perdita; and in A Simple Story she used several motifs from this play including the
tyrannical husband and father, the mother–daughter pair of heroines, and the jump in time.
Inchbald's first farces were submitted to the theatre managers Harris and Colman in 1781,
but were refused. Eventually her farce The Mogul Tale, submitted to Colman under an
assumed name, was accepted. Three English characters fly to the Orient in a balloon; the
topical interest of balloon ascents helped make the play popular, and it had a good run at
the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in July and August 1784. Inchbald acted in it
herself—stammering with nerves on the first night—and, once its success was assured,
declared her authorship and took applause for it from the stage. Colman paid her 100
guineas for the farce, and agreed to accept a comedy she had sent him previously, which
he altered and put on at the Haymarket as I'll Tell You What in 1785. This five-act
comedy of contemporary life was also a success, and as well as bringing her £300 for
three benefit nights, it gave her a fame which increased her value, and her wages, as an
actress.
From this time on Inchbald became a prolific and highly popular dramatist, whose most
successful productions brought high financial rewards. She estimated her proceeds from
Such Things Are (1787) as £900. She used her earnings to buy annuities, and by 1789,
with an investment income of £58 a year, she was able to give up her acting engagement
at Covent Garden and rely on her writing. Altogether nineteen of her comedies,
sentimental dramas, and farces were performed at the London theatres between 1784 and
1805. Some were original plots; others were translations or adaptations from French
plays, which she read in the original, and German ones, which she had to approach
through English translations. Her work ranged from broad farce such as Appearance is
Against them (1785), which was criticized for indecent expressions, to serious sentiment,
as in Such Things Are, which has topical interest in its fanciful portrait of the prison
reformer Howard as Haswell, a benevolent Englishman visiting Sumatra, freeing
prisoners—one of them the beloved wife of the very sultan who incarcerated her by
mistake—and generally sorting life out for the English expatriates. Like other dramatists
of the time, Inchbald wrote comedy about marriage and its problems, and parent–child
relations. To Marry, or not to Marry (1805) is a typically light-hearted exploration of its
theme, ending by answering the question it poses with a clear, sentimental affirmative.
She was interested in challenges to social convention: she included divorced couples in
some plays, and a favourite character type is the witty, irreverent young lady, a role in
which her friend the actress Elizabeth Farren specialized. One of her plays, Lover's Vows
(1798) from August Kotzebue's Child of Love, gave sympathetic treatment to a ‘fallen
woman’ and her illegitimate son, and has since become famous as the dangerous drama
performed in Austen's Mansfield Park. However, there were strict limits to how far
unconventionality could be explored in popular comedy at this date: All on a Summer's
Day (1787) was hissed by the audience and criticized in the reviews for portraying a
flirtatious, imprudent wife with sympathy. In general Inchbald managed to please her
audience by combining relatively liberal social views with the maintenance of social
order, often through the actions of a benevolent male authority figure. In Everyone has
his Fault (1792), for example, Mr Harmony manages to reconcile Sir Robert Ramble to
the virtuous former wife he had failed to appreciate, and Lord Norland to the daughter he
had disowned on her marriage to a poor man; to induce Mr Placid to take a firmer line
with his domineering wife, and to marry the old bachelor Solus to Miss Spinster. A
strong theme throughout this play is the critique of aristocratic extravagance and the
championship of poverty-stricken middle-class virtue, also found in Next Door
Neighbours (1791), one of her French adaptations. Wives as they Were and Maids as they
Are (1797) takes a sharp look at modern life, touching on the current questioning of
female subordination; but though there is a memorably disturbing moment when a
mistreated wife confirms that she fears her husband and refuses to say she loves him, the
comedy concludes in a conservative way, with wifely submission praised and the witty,
independent-minded Miss Dorrillon learning that she cannot manage without fatherly
guidance.
Social and political opinions and other writing
Inchbald's social and political views were radical. Her close friends included Thomas
Holcroft, who was tried in the treason trials of 1794, and William Godwin, until she
broke with him over his marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft. In her plays she generally
avoided any strong expression of her political sympathies, which would have endangered
her popular success. When she did use drama to explore current controversy, the theatre
managers refused to stage it. The Massacre, a historical play about the St Bartholomew's
day massacre which made clear the parallels between this subject and events during the
French Revolution, was never performed, and in 1792 she withdrew it from publication
on the advice of Holcroft and Godwin. Although its main thrust is to expose the horror of
the civil unrest that leads to the murder of Madame Tricastin and her children, the play is
not anti-revolutionary: its portrait of Glandeve, the ‘sworn friend to Liberty’ (Boaden,
Inchbald, 1.375) and tribunal president who rebukes the bloodthirsty Dugas, indicates
support for a moderate, Girondist stance, and would have marked Inchbald as a
revolutionary writer to a 1790s audience.
Once she was established as a playwright, Inchbald also returned to writing fiction, this
time with much greater success, and her first novel, A Simple Story, was highly praised
on its appearance in 1791. The £200 she got for it, though good pay for a novel at this
time, compared badly with the proceeds from dramatic hits, such as the £700 she made
from Every One has his Fault (1793). However, if novels were less lucrative than drama,
they opened up new artistic opportunities, leaving her freer to develop her challenging
views both on family and sexual relations and on class relations and political order. A
Simple Story explores in much greater psychological depth issues and behavioural
patterns that also preoccupied her in her plays: paternal authority as exercised by a stern
father who rejects his dependants, and the challenge to that authority represented by a
passionate and wilful young woman. Miss Milner's desire for a man who is a priest and
her guardian makes her a disruptive heroine, and though the novel concludes on a
conventional note, its overall effect is to disturb eighteenth-century complacency about
the benevolence of paternal power in a way Inchbald's drama did not. Her second and
final novel, Nature and Art (1796), was openly critical of English social institutions and
class structures. Through the story of two brothers and their children, one selfish father–
son pair, both of whom rise in a corrupt world, and one unselfish pair, condemned to
poverty, Inchbald attacks the system of patronage, the administration of justice, and the
cruelties and hypocrisies of sexual morality.
After her last comedy, To Marry or not to Marry, was performed at Covent Garden in
1805, Inchbald turned to critical and editorial work, producing The British Theatre, a
twenty-five-volume collection of plays with critical introductions, in 1806–9; a sevenvolume Collection of Farces and Afterpieces in 1809; and ten volumes of The Modern
Theatre in 1811. She wrote an article about the novel for the periodical The Artist in 1807,
but declined invitations to write for the Quarterly Review and to edit La Belle Assemblée.
For many years Inchbald was a well-known figure in London society, with a wide circle
of friends and a lively social life. Her fair, freckled, sandy-haired, slender beauty was
greatly admired and often painted. Her independent attitude, and her ability to nudge the
limits of acceptable feminine behaviour without ever laying herself open to scandal,
struck her contemporaries as remarkable. George Hardinge commented: ‘She lives
alone—her character has no tache upon it—and Mrs Siddons said she was as cold as ice:
but I cannot believe it’ (Nichols, Illustrations, 3.38). She kept meticulous records of her
considerable earnings and shrewd investments; but despite her growing wealth she
always lived very frugally, scrubbing her own floor and carrying her own coals. She kept
in touch with members of her family, all of them in much poorer circumstances than she
was, and helped them with money. For some time she was estranged from her sister
Debby, who seems to have entered prostitution; and though they were reconciled before
Debby's death in 1794, Inchbald felt guilty about her earlier attitude. The sympathetic
portrait of Hannah Primrose in Nature and Art may owe something to her feelings about
her sister. Another social outcast for sexual reasons, the actress Mary (Becky) Wells,
found Inchbald a constant friend and source of financial support.
Final years
Inchbald's life was marked by tensions between, on the one hand, political radicalism, a
passionate nature evidently attracted to a number of her admirers, and a love of
independence, and on the other hand, a desire for social respectability and a strong sense
of the emotional attraction of authority figures. If her own analysis of it contained
anything like the psychological skill of her novels, it would have been a marvellous
insight into the making of a woman writer in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, the
four-volume autobiography, which she began in 1795 and for which at one stage she was
offered £1000, was destroyed on the advice of her confessor. She did leave extensive
diaries, used by her biographer, which give a detailed account of her reading, writing,
earnings, investments, moods, migraines, dizzy spells, flirtations, proposals, and
friendships over fifty years. Some of these volumes still survive.
Inchbald's last years were spent in retirement and increasing seclusion. After what she
called her years of no religious existence, from the late 1770s until 1810, she renewed her
faith. She corresponded with and met Maria Edgeworth and Germaine de Staël, but on
the whole she avoided socializing, spending her time instead in religious observances and
studies. She died at Kensington House, Kensington, on Wednesday 1 August 1821, of ‘an
inflammation of the intestines’ (Boaden, Inchbald, 2.278) and was buried on 4 August in
Kensington churchyard.
Inchbald had great popular success and some critical praise for her witty comedies,
several of which remained available to the nineteenth-century public in her own edited
collection of English plays, The British Theatre. A Simple Story soon became her
greatest claim to fame. It was frequently reprinted in the nineteenth century, and its
appeal in an age of realist writing is indicated by Maria Edgeworth's praise:
I never read any novel that affected me so strongly, or that so completely possessed me
with the belief in the real existence of all the people it represents … I believed all to be
real, and was affected as I should be by the real scenes as if they had passed before my
eyes. (Littlewood, 123)
In the twentieth century, too, Inchbald was mainly remembered as a novelist, and is now
receiving increasing critical attention, especially from those interested in women's literary
history and in the revolutionary novels of the 1790s.
Jane Spencer