Elizabeth Inchbald

Elizabeth Inchbald , 1753-1821, English author. The daughter of a farmer, Joseph Simpson, she went to London in 1772 to seek her fortune on the stage. The same year she married a fellow actor, Joseph Inchbald. In 1784 she turned from acting to writing. Her plays, moral and sentimental, include I'll Tell You What (1785) and Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are (1797). However, she is better remembered for two romantic novels, A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796).

Bibliography: See biography by W. McKee (1935); B. R. Park, Thomas Holcroft and Elizabeth Inchbald (1952); R. Manvell, Elizabeth Inchbald: England's Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London (1988).

Inchbald, Elizabeth [née Simpson] (1753–1821), English actress and one of the first English women dramatists. She was for a time on the provincial stage, where she acted Cordelia to the King Lear of her husband Joseph Inchbald (?–1779), an inoffensive little man who painted and acted indifferently, and survived his marriage to the beautiful and spirited Elizabeth for only seven years. She was acting in Tate Wilkinson's company when her husband died, and later appeared at Covent Garden, retiring in 1785 to devote herself to playwriting after the moderate success of her first plays, which included I'll Tell You What (1785), The Widow's Vow (1786), and, from the French, The Midnight Hour; or, War of Wits (1787). She was a capable writer of sentimental comedy, and her plays, though not revived, were successful in their own day. Among the best were Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are (1797), and her last comedy, To Marry, or Not to Marry (1805). She also made English versions of Destouches's Le Philosophe marié as The Married Man (1789) and of Kotzebue's Das Kind der Liebe as Lovers' Vows (1798).

Inchbald, Mrs Elizabeth, née Simpson (1753–1821), novelist, dramatist, and actress. She is chiefly remembered for her two prose romances, A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1799), both of which display some skill in character and narration and illustrate her faith in natural upbringing (see primitivism); and her play Lovers' Vows (1798), the drama enacted by the Bertram family in J. Austen's Mansfield Park.