I'll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (review)

REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS137 which has a chapter on Cottin and locates her among eighteenth-century writers, and Olwen Hufton's magisterial The Prospect Before Her, 1995: the chapter on European women writers up to 1800 would have been relevant.) At the least, some sense of the overlap between Cottin's subjects and those tackled by her contemporaries would surely be needed to "prove" that she was writing out offrustration rather than because, say, she had the imaginative and intellectual curiosity to engage with the literary issues ofher time. Or ... because she could write well and knew it? Some letters quoted by Call himself, particularly late ones, strongly suggest this. One might therefore advance the picture ofa rather different Cottin: one who, initially self-deprecating and almost fearful of her authorship, became ever more confident, enjoying the income from her publications and able finally to recognize that she was writing from sheer pleasure in creativity. A dynamic Cottin, in short. "I cannot express how delightful writing is for me ... I cannot describe the pleasure I find in composing a work" (cited on 135). Call's comment here is that the writer's craft has "clearly become for her a therapeutic activity": would he have offered this reductive "explanation" ofa male writer revelling in his own inventiveness? • Readers ofthis review may like to know that Cottin's AmélieMansfield (1809 edition) has been retyped and placed on the Internet by Ellen Moody. This important and gripping novel is not likely to be reprinted in the near future. Text www.jimandellen.org/cottin/amelie.show.html; introduction (critical and textual notes): www.jimandellen.org/cottin/AMtextnote.html; bibliography: www.jimandellen.org/cottin/SCBiblio.hunl Alison Finch University of Cambridge Annibel Jenkins. I'll Tell You What: The Life ofElizabeth Inchbald. Lexington: UniversityPress ofKentucky, 2003. viii+596pp. US$39.95. ISBN 0-8131-2236-8. Jenkins's critical biography ofElizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) retraces her remarkable fifty-year career from her early days as a player on the circuit through her acting days on the London stage to her later years as a popular and respected playwright, novelist, and essayist. Meticulously written and edited, its thorough, highly readable synopses of every literary work written or translated by Inchbald will make it valuable to students widiout other access to these documents, but its special strength is itsjudicious use ofcontemporary documents as sources. Inchbald destroyed her memoirs at the end 138 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:1 of her life upon the advice of a priest, leaving future scholars to mull over what remained in the author's original hand: in addition to her considerable list of plays written and translated, and her novels and essays, the correspondence and die series of "pocket-books" she kept throughout her life. Elliptical and often downright enigmatic, the pocket-book entries nevertheless record whatmust have seemed for Inchbald the major occurrences or accomplishments ofeach day, month, oryear. In recounting critical events,Jenkins weaves together the often lively eyewitness narratives or insights from Inchbald's pocket-books or letters with those from various friends, acquaintances, orassociates, including, among manyothers, AmeliaAlderson (MrsJohn Opie), George Coiman die elder, George Colman the younger, Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, George Hardinge, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcraft,John Philip Kemble, Sarah Lennox, Mary Robinson, Sarah Kemble Siddons, and MaryWollstonecraft The result is a rich, dialogic version ofsuch events that enhances and complicates them and reduces the burden onJenkins oftrying to explain persistent mysteries. More than once in the course ofher book, in fact, when texts resist clarification, Jenkins acknowledges that she cannot be sure what a pocket-book entryor a remark in a letter means and, in lieu ofa single explanation, offers several possibilities (see, for example, her treatment ofa letter about the reception of? Simple Story, 316-18). Not only does this intertextual presentation ofInchbald's life enableJenkins to better measure Inchbald's literary achievements and professional accomplishments, it also lends her restrained and thoughtful speculations about some of Inchbald's words and actions increased plausibility. Jenkins's method is well illustrated in her discussion of an important moment near the beginning ofInchbald's long career: her husband's unexpected deadi.Joseph Inchbald died a sudden death at...